Quantum computing has been "five years away" for about thirty years. Mike Keymer thinks the wait is finally ending, and he has built a fund around that conviction. An MIT-trained engineer who spent two decades turning bleeding-edge science into commercial products, from US defense biometrics to ALS drug development analytics to quantum computing integration, Mike now runs Alphaket, a new seed fund backing the enabling systems that carry quantum from technical progress to commercial adoption. He sat down with Connor Sattely of Decile Group's Deals Team just hours after completing his first close.

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Mike doesn't dismiss the skepticism. He leans into it. What changed, he explains, is capital. "What we saw about 18 months ago was a massive influx of capital into the quantum computing field," starting around November 2024. That wave did three things: it solidified the horse race among the leading platforms, it capitalized those companies enough to focus on roadmaps instead of short-term hype, and, most important for an early stage investor, it opened a path to liquidity. "It's created a market for acquisitions. So now for earlier stage startups, there's actually a market for exit." For the deals guy across the table, that was the headline. Viable exits are exactly the reason to start a fund.

Mike keeps the structure simple. "So Alphaket is a seed fund. We're a $5 million fund. We're based here in Washington, DC area where I've worked for the last couple of decades." That geography is a thesis, not an accident. "There is no Silicon Valley for quantum, but there are a few regional hubs, and the DC Metro is one of those."

The fund grew out of two decades of operating. Mike launched startups and commercialized deep technologies for government agencies, then spent his last four to five years at a quantum computing company leading customer-facing activities, application development, business development, and later corporate strategy. That seat, he says, gave him a rare vantage point on what customers want, what the platforms can deliver, and where the gaps and opportunities actually sit.

Ask Mike whether Alphaket is chasing applications or infrastructure, and he's direct: infrastructure. But not the AI kind. Quantum, he explains, "is a super computing technology that will integrate with the big data centers. It's not gonna replace them," it will offload certain kinds of compute. The two problems every platform is racing to solve are "scale and quality." Quality is deep, performant qubit operations. Scale comes mostly through modularization.

That is where he sees value aggregating. The needed pieces are things the classical world takes for granted. "We think about modems, repeaters, memory." His verdict on porting them to quantum: "Really hard for quantum, but extraordinarily powerful." Networking smaller systems together, he argues, multiplies the value the big platforms have already poured into their machines, and it can be done near-term. Just "connecting a few quantum computers within the same local network," he says, "is a powerful value driver for quantum."

If the thesis is infrastructure, the sourcing edge is relationships. "Quantum is still a bit of a community," Mike says, and the conferences can feel like "the same 800 people" circling the globe together. He built those connections over years of operating, and he stays close to the regional hubs, Illinois, Boston, Colorado's Elevate Quantum, and his own backyard. From Arlington, Virginia, he notes, "one of our neighbors is DARPA," an unbiased evaluator of many of these systems. He also brings a former founder's lens to the deep-tech, early-stage entrepreneurs he backs, most of whom have never built a company before.

Mike says he has genuinely enjoyed fundraising, in part because "there's a discovery that's happening on both sides." His core LP archetype is clear: "high net worth individuals, people have been angel investors in the space" who see quantum's value but would rather have a specialist making the calls. In the DC area, he also draws defense and cybersecurity founders who bring their own networks as value-add investors, plus family offices. And he makes a pointed case for institutions: "Fund to funds is a great strategy for us because quantum computing is a deep tech strategy, but it's a specialization within deep tech." A specialist fund lets an allocator take a diversified slice of quantum rather than betting on one company. The investors who join, he adds, tend to be patient. They understand the big waves "may be three, four, five, six, seven years down the road."

Mike came to the decision only months earlier, as a first-time manager who had the thesis and the connections but needed a path. He found VC Lab almost by accident, after the application deadline "had passed like hours earlier." He rushed together a video and "45 minutes later got a response back saying, yeah, you're in." The program, he says, gave him what he was missing: "just having the framework that was structured for me to really be able to work through that thesis development was extraordinarily helpful."

With the fund documents out and the first close done, Mike is fired up to start writing checks across his three pillars, quantum computing, networking, and sensing, the last of which includes sensors sensitive enough "to navigate without GPS by mapping the magnetic field of the Earth." For LPs who want a specialist making the calls in a category most generalists can't underwrite, and for deep-tech founders building the enabling layers of quantum, Alphaket is built for exactly this moment.

Learn more about the fund and request access on Decile Access: https://decileaccess.com/funds/Alphaket-Fund-I

Alphaket Fund I is a $5 million seed fund based in the Washington, DC area, backing the infrastructure that brings quantum computing toward real commercial adoption. Founded by Mike Keymer, an MIT-trained engineer with two decades at the intersection of advanced technology and market adoption, including a recent tenure leading commercial work at a quantum computing company, the fund invests across quantum computing, networking, and sensing, with a focus on the enabling systems that let quantum platforms scale.

Watch The Full Episode Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlUngjfpDGY