Delft-based QuantWare has closed a Series B funding round of 152 million euros. It is the largest Series B round ever for a Dutch deep tech company and the largest private funding round in the world for a startup working on quantum chips. The funds will go toward KiloFab, a new QPU factory in Delft. With its own design that does not account for all quantum breakthroughs, QuantWare hopes to become the leading supplier of this new type of processor.
QuantWare produces commercial quantum processors (QPUs) that utilize a proprietary architecture. The company was founded as a spin-off from TU Delft and QuTech and has grown within five years to become the world’s largest commercial QPU supplier, with customers in twenty countries. The difference from other quantum players is that, as a fabless designer, QuantWare focuses solely on the quantum chip as a component, unlike companies such as IBM, Google, and Rigetti, which are pursuing a “full-stack” quantum solution.
The funding round follows the launch of VIO-40K, a modular architecture that QuantWare claims is the foundation for the world’s most powerful quantum chips. Previously, the company raised a €20 million Series A round and, together with partners, launched the first commercially deployable Quantum Open Architecture system in the U.S.
KiloFab: proprietary production facility in Delft
QuantWare will use the capital to build KiloFab, a production facility in Delft for the manufacture of VIO-40K QPUs. QuantWare had already announced this in December; the Series B funding will finance its further scaling up. KiloFab is intended to provide QuantWare with the industrial production capacity to serve the global market.
“Quantum computers will help solve humanity’s greatest challenges, but only if they can be manufactured on an industrial scale. That is exactly what we are working on,” said CEO and co-founder Matthijs Rijlaarsdam.
Investors and International Reach
The oversubscribed round is attracting new names: Intel Capital, In-Q-Tel, and ETF Partners are joining the investment. They join existing investors FORWARD.one, Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, InnovationQuarter Capital, Ground State Ventures, and Graduate Ventures.
QuantWare thus supplies QPUs on a commercial basis, but the revolution in the field of such processors has not yet taken place. To achieve that, research is needed from all kinds of organizations. That is why QuantWare supplies the hardware to quantum computing companies, national technology institutes, and major tech companies.
Eventually, established cloud players like Microsoft and Google Cloud could make a run at that predicted quantum revolution with successors to Majorana-1 and Willow, respectively. A startup in Delft is therefore trying to beat them to it.