ZuriQ raises $4.2M to break quantum computing's scaling barrier

Quantum startup Zuriq has raised $4.2M to commercialize a radical new architecture that could finally break through this scaling barrier. The seed funding round was led by Founderful with participation from SquareOne, First Momentum Ventures, OnSight Ventures and QAI Ventures.

Trapped ions have been one of the most powerful approaches in quantum computing, demonstrating world-record performance, long coherence times and long-range connectivity. But these systems face a fundamental challenge: they struggle to dramatically scale up the number of physical qubits.

ZuriQ's technology changes how ions are trapped, moving from purely electric fields to a combination of electric and magnetic fields. This allows ions to move in all spatial directions like an aeroplane, while competitor ions are more like cars driving along roads and through junctions. As the number of ions grows, just like too many cars creating traffic jams in busy city centers, bottlenecks in information flow will form on the trap chip. The freedom to move the ions in the ZuriQ approach is the key step to unlock the performance of these systems at scale.

The company will demonstrate its first prototype late this year that will have dozens of ions in a reconfigurable 2-d grid. Investor Pascal Mathis, Partner at Founderful, said: “We have been highly impressed by the speed of execution of ZuriQ’s founding team and the pace of progress towards technical milestones that have been elusive in the community so far.”

"The space for few-qubit devices that act as toy models is already saturated," said Pavel Hrmo, CEO of ZuriQ. "Devices with 20-40 qubits won't drive large profits. We need to focus on long-term scalability and demonstrate that our platform can grow the number of ions in two dimensions faster than our competitors."