PsiQuantum announces $1 billion Series E funding round
The company, which is leveraging integrated photonics and high-volume semiconductor manufacturing to build million-qubit-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers, is also collaborating with NVIDIA on areas including quantum software and QPU-GPU integration
PsiQuantum has announced it has raised $1 billion in funding for its Series E round to pursue its goal of building the world’s first commercially useful, fault-tolerant quantum computers. With the new funding, the company aims to break ground on utility-scale quantum computing sites in Brisbane and Chicago, deploy large-scale prototype systems to validate systems architecture and integration, and further advance the performance of its quantum photonic chips and fault-tolerant architecture.
Led by funds and accounts managed by affiliates of BlackRock, along with Temasek and Baillie Gifford, this fundraising values the company at $7 billion and brings in new investors, as well as including participation from existing investors.
According to PsiQuantum, commercially valuable quantum computing requires error correction – and therefore on the order of a million physical qubits, but fault-tolerant systems at this scale face challenges of manufacturability, cooling, and networking. The company aims to overcome these barriers by harnessing the unique strengths of photonic qubits, combined with direct leverage of high-volume semiconductor manufacturing.
“Only building the real thing – million-qubit-scale, fault-tolerant machines – will unlock the promise of quantum computing,” said Jeremy O’Brien, PsiQuantum co-founder and CEO. “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 US semiconductor fab. With this funding, we’re ready to take the next decisive steps to deliver the full potential of quantum computing.”
Pete Shadbolt, co-founder and chief scientific officer, said: “Nearly nine years after we started, we have pushed the technology to an unprecedented level of maturity and performance. 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.”
In addition to investment support from NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), 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.
Since the company’s Series D financing in 2021, PsiQuantum says it 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 adds that it has integrated barium titanate (BTO) into its manufacturing flow, a material it describes as one of the world’s highest-performing electro-optic materials, ideally suited for ultra-high-performance optical switches: the missing component for scaling optical quantum computing. PsiQuantum manufactures 300 mm wafers of BTO at its facilities in California, which are then integrated together with wafers manufactured at GlobalFoundries.
With this new funding, PsiQuantum aims 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, the company adds, an area of increased interest, where low-power, high-speed optical networking is increasingly relevant.
“AI is built on classical computing, which has underpinned the last 50 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.”
Luke Ward, private companies investment manager at Baillie Gifford, commented: “We first backed PsiQuantum over six years ago, recognising its unique approach to scaling quantum computing. 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.”
