Two startups pursuing different approaches to quantum computing announced major funding rounds today.

California-based Oratomic, which uses reconfigurable neutral-atom arrays, raised $475 million, while United Kingdom-based Universal Quantum Ltd., which develops modular trapped-ion systems, raised more than $100 million in Series A funding.

Oratomic’s funding round comes three months after its $300 million Series A round. ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures, General Catalyst and Bezos Expeditions co-led the Series B round. The investment brings the company’s total funding to date to $775 million and raised its valuation to $5.5 billion from $1.5 billion.

DCVC and Firgun Ventures co-led Universal Quantum’s funding, representing the largest Series A raised by a UK-headquartered quantum computing firm. EDBI, Artal, Integral GlobalTech, Main Sequence, Hostplus and more than half a dozen other venture capital firms also participated in the round.

“Universal Quantum’s progress reflects our partners’ belief that we represent one of the most credible paths to quantum computing at scale,” said Universal Quantum co-founder and Chief Executive Dr. Sebastian Weidt.

The company develops specialized chips using trapped-ion technology, using charged atoms held in place by electric fields to act as qubits. These are the essential logical states for quantum computing, acting as 1s and 0s for computation. Unlike classical computing, they can also exist in superposition, or be both 1 and 0 at the same time; they can also be interconnected, or entangled, so when one is affected, another changes as well.

Universal Quantum’s vision is to take these chips to build modules that can be scaled in a practical, readily manufacturable method for fault-tolerant quantum computing. The company uses its technology to isolate and control for errors from the qubit up at the chip level, making its system highly efficient and readily scalable. This lets the company integrate classical computing control units directly with the quantum chip layer, increasing speed and reducing noise.

Noise reduction and error correction are important for fault tolerance in quantum computing. This is because an individual qubit is extremely fragile. Although it’s possible to spin one up, it is not easy to read the information from it, and the slightest “noise” from the outside, such as a change in heat, electromagnetism, vibration or even stray cosmic particles, can cause it to lose its information. The more qubits that get connected and the faster they’re read, the more errors can be reduced overall.

Founded in 2025, Oratomic uses neutral atoms, a different approach to producing qubits but no less capable. It also focuses on scalable, fault-tolerant, error-corrected quantum computing that aims to do error correction with fewer qubits than the industry standard. Current quantum standards vary around 1 million qubits to deliver meaningful commercial fault tolerance. Oratomic believes it can build a quantum computer with only 10,000 qubits and still maintain high fidelity.

Oratomic co-founder and CEO Dolev Bluvstein also echoed that the race to commercially viable quantum computing hinges on working computers that can be manufactured cheaply.

“We have no idea what the business models are going to be,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “We have no idea exactly what the applications are going to be but what we do know is that we need to cross this tipping point where we can build a working computer that is cheap and manufacturable. That’s when this becomes a real technology.”

According to a report from market analyst McKinsey Insights, quantum computing could create up to $2.7 trillion in economic value worldwide by 2035 within current industry use cases and unlock new ones. The firm’s research revealed that more than $1 billion in revenue was generated worldwide in 2025 and that could grow to more than $4.4 billion in 2028.

Quantum-computing developers are targeting applications in drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling and industrial optimization, where commercial and research opportunities focus on algorithms that can take advantage of the computational capabilities.

Universal Quantum said it will use the funding to continue developing and commercializing its modular approach to quantum computing, which is needed for practical error correction at scale, with its interconnect technology that uses chiplet arrays and control systems.

The funding will also support the company’s recent expansion in Singapore, where it is establishing its first research and development center outside of Europe, alongside growth within the United States, Japan and its German hub in Hamburg.

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