Original Coverage & Source Attribution: en.wowtale.net
Money is pouring into quantum computing. In the same week, U.S. startup Oratomic closed a large round and UK trapped-ion startup Universal Quantum raised more than $100 million — the largest Series A ever for a UK-headquartered quantum computing company. No one has built a commercially useful quantum computer yet, but investors are racing to back whoever gets to “fault-tolerant” first.
Oratomic builds quantum computers using neutral atoms, trapping individual atoms with lasers like “optical tweezers” and freely rearranging them mid-computation. Because atoms can be moved around, a single atom can form error-correction relationships with many more neighbors than fixed architectures allow — which the company says means far fewer qubits are needed for error correction. On that basis, Oratomic argues a utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer is achievable with roughly 10,000 to 20,000 reconfigurable neutral-atom qubits, rather than the millions some rival approaches require.
The company came out of stealth this past March. Its founding team is made up of researchers who originally believed commercially useful quantum computing was still far off, drawn mainly from Caltech physics along with researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Amazon and Google. CEO Dolev Bluvstein comes from Harvard’s Lukin group. Co-founder and Caltech professor Manuel Endres has already trapped arrays of roughly 6,000 atoms in the lab, providing experimental backing for the company’s claims, and theoretical physicist John Preskill — who coined the term “quantum supremacy” — serves as an advisor.
Oratomic said on October 8 that it had closed a $475 million Series B co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures, General Catalyst and Bezos Expeditions — just three months after closing its $300 million Series A in July. Including this round, the company says it has raised $775 million in total since launching in March.
Oratomic didn’t disclose a valuation for the new round. Press reports put it at $5.4-5.5 billion, up from $1.5 billion after the Series A, though neither figure has been officially confirmed. The new capital will go toward growing Oratomic’s science and engineering team, lab infrastructure, and the systems needed to build its machines.
Competition splits into three camps. Among neutral-atom rivals, QuEra is the closest competitor, working closely with AWS toward a fault-tolerant machine by 2028 and having raised $230 million from Google, SoftBank and others. Atom Computing said the same week that it advanced to the final stage of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, with up to $300 million in potential follow-on funding and algorithmic and error-correction support from Microsoft. In Europe, Pasqal launched a €50 million initiative called Q-PLANET, bringing together 28 partners to build a European supply chain for neutral-atom chips.
Rivals using other approaches aren’t standing still either. Trapped-ion player Quantinuum raised $600 million at a $10 billion valuation last September, then filed to go public on Nasdaq this May at a targeted $12.7 billion valuation. Superconducting-qubit efforts from Google and IBM remain in the race too, and shares of publicly traded IonQ and Rigetti have both climbed sharply over the past year and a half.
If fault-tolerant quantum computing arrives, the expectation is that it could unlock breakthroughs anywhere complex computation matters — biotech, chemistry, logistics, AI, cryptography. But as Oratomic itself has acknowledged, the same machine could also run Shor’s algorithm well enough to break today’s widely used public-key encryption, which is why governments and standards bodies are racing toward post-quantum cryptography ahead of a 2035 target.
