Oratomic Inc., a quantum computing startup, has raised $300 million in early-stage funding to scale its quantum hardware and accelerate its path to fault tolerance and error correction, creating the next generation of computing capabilities.

The Series A round, announced Monday, was co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Khosla Ventures. Other investors also participating in the round included Bezos Expeditions, Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Lowercarbon Capital, Bain Capital, Formation, Nebular and more than a half-dozen others.

Led by Chief Executive Dolev Bluvstein, the company launched in late March this year to build utility-scale quantum technology using neutral-atom technology in collaboration with scientists at the California Institute of Technology.

“Oratomic’s founding team all previously believed that commercially useful quantum computing was far away,” Bluvstein said in the launch press release. “Our new research advances simultaneously changed all of our minds. We have assembled a team of top experts across neutral-atom quantum computing, error-correction theory, artificial intelligence, and optical engineering and we are on a focused mission to build a utility-scale quantum computer.”

Oratomic and Caltech argue that a utility-scale, cryptographically relevant fault-tolerant quantum computer can be realized with roughly 10,000 reconfigurable neutral-atom qubits. This scale is much smaller than the larger options offered by others in the market, aiming to scale to 1 million qubits, such as IQM Quantum Computers, which raised $320 million in late 2025, to protect against errors and noise.

In quantum computing, the qubit is the basic logical unit; think of it as the powerful but clumsy worker. It is like the logical bit in a classical computer, except that it can store more than just 1 or 0; it can also wait in a state that’s between them both. However, it’s also very error-prone and can fumble. Any stray noise, vibration or change in temperature can cause it to forget or make it a mistake.

The usual fix is safety in numbers. To get one reliable worker, companies surround them with a giant crew of backup workers, who constantly check each other’s work on the fly. This is error correction. It’s why a million physical qubits are grouped together to build a machine that then produces a much smaller number of logical error-corrected qubits.

Oratomic claims that they have found a smarter way to do this by using tightly focused laser beams, nicknamed “optical tweezers,” to pick up and move atoms around while they’re making calculations. Because they can catch and rearrange the atoms – the workers in this case – each worker can error correct more neighbors. Using this hardware, the company says it needs only 10,000 atoms to build qubits, down from a million.

One of the company’s founders said that 6,000 atoms have already been trapped in an array in lab conditions. Although it’s not a finished computer, it has shown the promise needed to build the quantum hardware.

The quantum industry is already crowded with contenders attempting to build fault tolerance and the race is on. In the startup space, Oratomic’s closest rivals include Atom Computing Inc., which his also tackling neutral atom hardware and raised $300 million, and QuEra Computing Inc., which is working closely with Amazon Web Services Inc., intends to launch its fault-tolerant quantum machine in 2028.

Bigger players include Google LLC and IBM Corp., which work with superconducting qubits, and Quantinuum Inc., which recently filed to go public at a $12.7 billion valuation and works with trapped-ion qubits.

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