California-based quantum computing startup PsiQuantum, USA, announced that it has completed a series E venture round that raised US$1 billion. The company says that the new funding will allow it to break ground on planned quantum computing sites in Brisbane, Australia, and Chicago, USA, as well as supporting the deployment of large-scale prototype systems and advancing its quantum photonic chips and fault-tolerant architecture.

“With this funding, we’re ready to take the next decisive steps to deliver the full potential of quantum computing,” said PsiQuantum cofounder and CEO Jeremy O’Brien in a press release accompanying the announcement.

Toward a million qubits

Since the company’s 2016 founding, the PsiQuantum team has held that commercially viable quantum computing would require error correction and fault tolerance, and therefore on the order of one million physical qubits. To this end, since completing its series D funding around in 2021, the company has established a high-volume manufacturing process for its integrated photonic chipset Omega at GlobalFoundries’ Fab 8 in Malta, NY, USA.

Fabricated on full-sized silicon wafers, Omega includes high-performance single-photon sources, superconducting single-photon detectors, and a “next-generation” optical switch based on barium titanate (BTO). PsiQuantum points to the inclusion of BTO as critical, saying that it is “ideally suited for ultra-high-performance optical switches; the missing component for scaling optical quantum computing.” The company manufactures BTO in 300-mm wafers at its facilities in California, and notes that the new funding will allow it to further scale up production toward the volumes needed for utility-scale quantum computing.

“Only building the real thing—million-qubit-scale, fault-tolerant machines—will unlock the promise of quantum computing,” said O’Brien. “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.”

New funding influx

The latest round of funding was led by funds and accounts managed by affiliates of private equity firm BlackRock, along with Temasek and Baillie Gifford. It also attracted new investors, including Macquarie Capital, Ribbit Capital, Nvidia’s “NVentures” unit, Adage Capital Management, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Type One Ventures, Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), 1789 Capital, and S Ventures (SentinelOne). The fundraising has reportedly pushed PsiQuantum’s value to US$7 billion.

In addition to obtaining funding from Nvidia’s 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 Pete Shadbolt, PsiQuantum cofounder 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.”