Dealmakers: Ilyas Khan taking a quantum leap

Ilyas Khan’s route to billionaire status has taken him from a two-up-two-down house in east Lancashire to New York, via Hong Kong, Cambridge and Accrington Stanley.

The 63-year-old native of Accrington has made headlines this summer, with media outlets reporting how he is now one of Britain’s richest tech entrepreneurs after the quantum computing company he founded went public.

The listing in June initially valued Quantinuum at more than $15.6bn after it sold 28 million shares at $60 each. And according to reports Ilyas, who owns around 15 per cent of the business and remains as its chief product officer, was worth around $2bn as a result.

The former friend of the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, Ilyas celebrated the successful public offering of the business, now trading on the Manhattan based NASDAQ exchange, with a walk in Central Park.

It’s all a far cry from Ilyas’ early years. The son of a bus driver from Kashmir, he has described his family’s circumstances when he was a child – living in a house with a number of others - as “challenging”, adding in an interview with Lancashire Business View in 2012: “Which I think is the politically correct way of putting it.”

The young Ilyas did well academically, graduating from the University of London in 1984, before joining asset management firm Schroders and embarking on a career in investment banking.

In 1989 he moved to Hong Kong and eventually set up private equity and venture capital firm Stanhill Capital Partners in 1998.

With its headquarters in London and offices in Cambridge and Hong Kong, Stanhill invests in the technology, consumer brands, oil, gas, metals and mining sectors. The firm invests in seed capital, expansion capital, buyouts, turnarounds, and pre-IPO.

For the full story, see page 40 of issue 129