Dutch quantum hardware company QuantWare B.V. said Tuesday it has raised €20 million, or about $21.5 million, in an early-stage funding round.

The money from the Series A round will be used to build out its chip fabrication facilities, in which it will roll out its technology to help solve scaling bottlenecks that limit the size of quantum processors.

The new round was co-led by Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund and Innovation Quarter. Additional participation came from EIC Fund and existing investors, including FORWARD.one, Graduate Entrepreneur Fund, QDNL Participations and Job van der Voort, founder and chief executive of remote work and employment tools company Remote.

The company was founded in 2020 by Dr. Alessandro Bruno, a quantum engineer with more than 15 years of experience in the field, and Matthijs Rijlaarsdam, a Delft University of Technology graduate. QuantWare develops VIO, a technology that allows its customers to build larger single-chip quantum processing units, which are less prone to interference.

Quantum processors are limited by the number of qubits they can stack next to each other and as a result builders must network them together to build larger systems. A qubit is the quantum computing equivalent of the bit from classical computing, capable of representing a one or a zero. But unlike classical bits, qubits can also hold a quasi-state between a one and a zero. However, they are also extremely fragile and prone to errors caused by noise generated by vibrations, electromagnetism, heat and external interference.

Because of the noise introduced by network links, these networked computers are much more error-prone and far less powerful than monolithic single-chip systems. QuantWare said that although powerful quantum computers have been built by leading companies such as IBM Corp. and Google LLC with more than 100 and 1,000 qubits, respectively, including the recent Google Willow chip, the company’s VIO hardware could allow them to scale well beyond that.

“Our mission is to make VIO the scaling standard, and have it power the first million-qubit quantum computers of the hyperscalers of tomorrow,” said CEO Matthijs Rijlaarsdam. “We are building the best team in the world to achieve this mission.”

The company said it has signed on numerous customers across 20 countries around the world to power their quantum computers. The new funds will be used to develop the VIO technology further and scale QuantWave’s chip foundry to enable to creation of larger QPUs for its customer base. The company offers VIO through its own designed QPUs and third-party customers can use the technology via the foundry and packaging services.

Last week, QuantWave introduced Contralto-A, a quantum processor with error correction that features up to 17 transmon qubits with tunable couplers. The company said that makes it twice as large as competing solutions that are commercially available, and it represents a first step on the company’s roadmap that’s easily upgradable to larger QPUs powered by the VIO platform.

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