QuantWare raises $178M to become the TSMC of quantum computing

Netherlands-based quantum computing hardware company QuantWare B.V. said today it has raised $178 million in funding to accelerate its plans of creating an “open architecture” for the industry.

The round was announced alongside the debut of VIO-40K, a new quantum processor architecture that supports the development of chips with up to 10,000 qubits, about 100 times larger than today’s leading designs. Today’s oversubscribed round was led by Intel Capital, IQT and ETF Partners, and saw participation from early investors, including FORWARD.one, Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, InnovationQuarter Capital, Ground State Ventures and Graduate Ventures.

QuantWare is not building a quantum computer itself. Rather, its goal is to become a critical piece of the quantum computing supply chain. It has previously been referred to as the “TSMC” of the quantum computing industry, because just as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. sells processors to the likes of Dell Technologies Inc. and HP Inc. so they can build personal computers, it’s building the quantum chips for other companies to construct their own hardware.

The company designs and manufactures quantum processing units or QPUs based on a superconducting architecture, similar to the technology being pursued by Google LLC and IBM Corp. It sells these chips off-the-shelf, targeting universities, startups and national laboratories looking to skip the research stage and directly build quantum computers for experimentation.

QuantWare will use the funds from today’s round to accelerate the development of KiloFab, which is envisioned to be the world’s largest dedicated quantum open architecture fab. It will increase the company’s QPU production capacity by about 20 times, enabling it to meet the accelerating demand for its chips. Researchers will be able to send them their quantum chip designs and have QuantWare build it on its specialized fabrication process.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Matt Rijlaarsdam said having this kind of supply chain is vital for the nascent industry to be able to manufacture and deploy quantum processors at scale. “VIO-40K will deliver 10,000-qubit processors on an open architecture that the entire ecosystem can build on, and KiloFab gives us the industrial production capacity to meet rapidly growing global demand,” he added.

KiloFab leverages the company’s proprietary VIO technology, a modular quantum processor architecture that enables quantum chips to be built with industry-leading compute per watt. To date, QuantWare has already shipped working quantum processors to more than 50 companies and labs across 20 countries, and has become the world’s largest commercial QPU supplier by volume.

Intel Capital’s Kike Miralles said it has become increasingly difficult for the world’s quantum computing startups to scale their designs, due to the challenges of packaging and manufacturing their chips. “QuantWare recognized that early and built VIO to address it,” he said. “That combination of technical ambition and execution positions them to become the company on which the future of superconducting quantum systems will be built.”

Photo: QuantWare