Photonic quantum computing startup Quantum Source extends Seed round to $27 million
Photonic quantum computing startup Quantum Source extends Seed round to $27 million
The $12 million extension from Dell Technologies Capital makes it one of the largest Seed rounds for Quantum Computing
Israel-based Quantum Source, a technology company that is aiming to bring photonic quantum computers to market, has announced that it has raised a $12 million Seed extension round led by Dell Technologies Capital (DTC), with participation from 10D as well as existing investors Eclipse VC, Grove Ventures, and Pitango. This recent extension brings the total Seed round to $27 million - making it one of the largest Seed financings in Quantum Computing.
Photonic quantum computing is a form of quantum computing that uses photons as a representation of qubits. Quantum Source adopts an approach for generating photons and quantum gates that is five orders of magnitude more efficient than state-of-the-art implementation.
1 View gallery
Gil Semo, VP Rַַ&D, Shlomit Semel, VP HR, Oded Melamed, CEO, Barak Dayan, Professor at Weizmann Institute of Science
(Photo: Ifat Golan)
“We founded Quantum Source with the belief that photonic quantum technologies are the best route to achieve large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers,” explained Oded Melamed, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Source. “Our unique approach will dramatically improve the scalability of those machines and will be the key to commercial success of quantum computers. Having investors such as Dell Technologies Capital believe in us will allow us to accelerate our work and by extension, entire industries.”
To date, companies have built small quantum computers with tens or hundreds of qubits. Quantum Source is developing technology to help with the efficient implementation of large-scale fault-tolerant photonic quantum computers and aims to build these systems that can scale to millions of qubits and have the potential to unleash acceleration in a number of cutting-edge fields. Areas where this may be useful in the future include drug design, material development, cybersecurity, and the processing of large datasets for AI applications.
The additional $12 million will be used to expand the company’s research and development team as it scales to reach technical and performance milestones in the future.
“DTC invests in technologies that can move industries forward,” added Omri Green, partner at DTC. “We believe quantum computing has this potential and, as our first investment in this area, that Quantum Source can be the team to get us there.” Green called the Quantum Source group an “exceptional team of scientists and proven entrepreneurs” who are addressing photonic quantum hurdles like scalability and fault tolerance.
Quantum Source was founded in 2021 and is led by co-founders CEO Oded Melamed (CEO), Gil Semo (VP of R&D), Prof. Barak Dayan (Chief Scientist), and Dan Charash (Chairman). Together they all share backgrounds founding and selling companies to Apple, Broadcom, and Sony, with 170 articles published between them. The broader team has 18 PhDs from institutions such as Caltech, Columbia University, MIT, Weismann Institute of Science, and Yale University. DTC was founded in 2012 and has backed startups such as JFrog, Redis, and more.
