Capping an active recent period for quantum venture investing, PsiQuantum today announced it has raised $1 billion in funding for its Series E round.
The news comes after recent venture round news from QuEra ($230 million) and IQM Quantum Computers ($300 million).
The PsiQuantum funds will support plans to break ground on utility-scale quantum sites in Brisbane and Chicago, deploy prototype systems to validate systems architecture and integration, and advance the performance of its quantum photonic chips and fault-tolerant architecture, according to the company.
Led by funds managed by affiliates of BlackRock, along with Temasek and Baillie Gifford, this fundraising values the company at $7 billion and brings in new investors Macquarie Capital, Ribbit Capital, NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), Adage Capital, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Type One Ventures, Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), 1789 Capital, and S Ventures (SentinelOne). The round includes existing investors Blackbird, Third Point Ventures, and T. Rowe Price Associates.
“Only building the real thing—million-qubit-scale, fault-tolerant machines—will unlock the promise of quantum computing,” said Prof. Jeremy O’Brien, PsiQuantum co-founder and Chief Executive Officer. “We defined what it takes from day one: this is a grand engineering challenge, not a science experiment. We tackled the hardest problems first—at the architectural and chip level—and are now mass-manufacturing best-in-class quantum photonic chips at a leading U.S. semiconductor fab. With this funding, we’re ready to take the next decisive steps to deliver the full potential of quantum computing.”
Artist renderings of PsiQuantum plans for plants in Australia and Chicago
PsiQuantum was founded on the premise that commercially valuable quantum computing requires error correction—and therefore on the order of a million physical qubits. Teams worldwide are now racing to build fault-tolerant systems at this scale, and are increasingly facing scaling challenges of manufacturability, cooling, and networking. PsiQuantum’s thesis is that the unique strengths of photonic qubits, combined with direct leverage of high-volume semiconductor manufacturing, provide a fast path through these barriers.
In addition to investment support from NVentures, PsiQuantum is collaborating with NVIDIA across a broad range of development areas, including quantum algorithms and software, GPU-QPU integration and PsiQuantum’s silicon photonics platform.
“Nearly nine years after we started, we have pushed the technology to an unprecedented level of maturity and performance” said Dr. Pete Shadbolt, PsiQuantum co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer. “We have the chips, we have the switches, we have a scalable cooling technology, we can do networking, we have found the sites, we have the commercial motive and the government support – we’re ready to get on and build utility-scale systems”
Since the company’s Series D financing in 2021, PsiQuantum has established a high-volume manufacturing process for its integrated photonic chipset, containing the components needed for photonic quantum computing—all of which perform beyond the state-of-the-art. This chipset is designed by PsiQuantum and manufactured at GlobalFoundries’ Fab 8 in New York—a high-volume, commercial semiconductor foundry.
Critically, PsiQuantum has integrated Barium Titanate (BTO) into its manufacturing flow. BTO is one of the world’s highest-performing electro-optic materials, which makes it ideally suited for ultra-high-performance optical switches; the missing component for scaling optical quantum computing. PsiQuantum manufactures 300mm wafers of BTO at its facilities in California, which are then integrated together with wafers manufactured at GlobalFoundries.
This new funding will enable PsiQuantum to further scale up BTO production towards the volumes needed for utility-scale quantum computing. The BTO-enabled optical switch also has potential in next-generation AI supercomputers, an area of increased interest given rapidly-growing AI workloads—where low-power, high-speed optical networking is increasingly relevant.
In addition to the photonic chips which generate, manipulate and measure qubits, PsiQuantum also develops the cooling, networking, and control systems for utility-scale machines. Due to its photonic approach, the company does not depend on the “chandelier”-style cryostats frequently used in quantum computing and has designed and commissioned a new high-density cooling solution, similar to the modular racks found in a data center, with the capacity to cool hundreds of quantum chips in a single cabinet. The company has also demonstrated high-fidelity quantum networking between distant cabinets using standard telecom fiber—a key requirement for most approaches to utility-scale quantum computing.
“AI is built on classical computing, which has underpinned the last fifty years of technology,” said Tony Kim, Head of the Fundamental Equities Technology Group at BlackRock. “Now, we are at the dawn of an adjacent computing platform – rooted in quantum mechanics – that will allow us to simulate the physical world with transformative accuracy.”
“We first backed PsiQuantum over six years ago, recognising its unique approach to scaling quantum computing,” said Luke Ward, private companies investment manager, Baillie Gifford. “Since then, the company has consistently hit technical milestones while forging deep partnerships across industry and government. With a vision rooted in practicality, PsiQuantum is now positioned at the forefront of what could be a trillion-dollar industry, able to solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges. This goes beyond what is possible with AI.”
