Palo Alto, California · 10 September 2025
PsiQuantum announced the closing of a $1 billion Series E funding round, making the photonic quantum computing company the most funded quantum startup in the world. The round values the company at approximately $7 billion and brings in a broad syndicate of new and existing investors. Concurrently, PsiQuantum announced a collaboration with NVIDIA spanning quantum algorithms, GPU-QPU integration, and silicon photonics platform development.
The funding is earmarked to accelerate PsiQuantum's mission to build the world's first commercially useful, fault-tolerant quantum computer. Specifically, the capital will support breaking ground on utility-scale quantum computing sites in Brisbane, Australia, and Chicago, USA; deploying large-scale prototype systems to validate system architecture and integration; and further advancing the performance of the company's quantum photonic chips and fault-tolerant architecture.
The Photonic Approach to Quantum Computing
PsiQuantum's approach to quantum computing differs fundamentally from the superconducting and trapped-ion architectures that dominate much of the industry. The company uses photonic qubits — qubits encoded in particles of light — and leverages high-volume semiconductor manufacturing processes to overcome the scaling challenges that hinder other quantum computing modalities.
The company was founded on the premise that commercially valuable quantum computing requires error correction, and therefore on the order of one million physical qubits. While many quantum computing efforts have focused on demonstrating small-scale systems with tens or hundreds of qubits, PsiQuantum has consistently argued that the path to commercial utility runs through million-qubit-scale machines with full fault tolerance.
Investors and Strategic Partners
The Series E round was led by funds and accounts managed by affiliates of BlackRock, along with Temasek and Baillie Gifford. New investors included entities administered by Macquarie Capital, Ribbit Capital, NVentures (NVIDIA's venture capital arm), Adage Capital Management, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Type One Ventures, Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), 1789 Capital, and S Ventures (SentinelOne). Existing investors Blackbird, Third Point Ventures, and T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. also participated.
Tony Kim, Head of the Fundamental Equities Technology Group at BlackRock, framed the investment within the broader computing landscape: "AI is built on classical computing, which has underpinned the last fifty years of technology. Now, we are at the dawn of an adjacent computing platform — rooted in quantum mechanics — that will allow us to simulate the physical world with transformative accuracy."
Luke Ward, private companies investment manager at Baillie Gifford, which first backed PsiQuantum over six years ago, said: "PsiQuantum is now positioned at the forefront of what could be a trillion-dollar industry, able to solve some of humanity's biggest challenges. This goes beyond what is possible with AI."
Chip Manufacturing and the Omega Chipset
Since its Series D financing in 2021, PsiQuantum has established a high-volume manufacturing process for its integrated photonic chipset at GlobalFoundries' Fab 8 in New York. The chipset contains the components needed for photonic quantum computing — including single-photon sources, detectors, and optical circuits — all of which perform beyond the state of the art, according to the company.
A critical manufacturing milestone has been the integration of Barium Titanate (BTO) into PsiQuantum's production flow. BTO is one of the world's highest-performing electro-optic materials, making it ideally suited for ultra-high-performance optical switches — a component that has been described as the missing piece for scaling optical quantum computing. PsiQuantum manufactures 300mm wafers of BTO at its facilities in California, which are then integrated with wafers produced at GlobalFoundries.
The BTO-enabled optical switch also has potential applications in next-generation AI supercomputers, where low-power, high-speed optical networking is increasingly relevant given rapidly growing AI workloads.
Cooling and Networking Architecture
Due to its photonic approach, PsiQuantum does not depend on the "chandelier"-style cryostats frequently associated with quantum computing. Instead, the company has designed and commissioned a new high-density cooling solution, similar to the modular racks found in a conventional data centre, with the capacity to cool hundreds of quantum chips in a single cabinet.
The company has also demonstrated high-fidelity quantum networking between distant cabinets using standard telecommunications fibre — a key requirement for most approaches to utility-scale quantum computing, where multiple quantum processors must be connected to form a single, larger logical machine.
The NVIDIA Collaboration
Alongside the investment from NVentures, PsiQuantum announced a collaboration with NVIDIA across a broad range of development areas, including quantum algorithms and software, GPU-QPU (quantum processing unit) integration, and the advancement of PsiQuantum's silicon photonics platform.
The partnership reflects a growing industry trend toward hybrid quantum-classical computing, where quantum processors work in conjunction with classical GPUs and CPUs to solve problems that neither architecture can tackle efficiently alone. NVIDIA's CUDA-Q platform and cuQuantum SDK, which were also highlighted in the context of the JUPITER supercomputer launched in June 2025, provide software infrastructure for this integration.
Industry Context
The $1 billion raise occurred during a period of record investment in quantum computing. According to research from SpinQ, quantum computing companies raised $3.77 billion in equity funding during the first nine months of 2025 — nearly triple the $1.3 billion raised during the entirety of 2024. PsiQuantum's Series E represents the single largest funding event in the sector to date.
Prof. Jeremy O'Brien, PsiQuantum co-founder and CEO, said: "Only building the real thing — million-qubit-scale, fault-tolerant machines — will unlock the promise of quantum computing. 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 U.S. semiconductor fab."
Dr. Pete Shadbolt, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, added: "Nearly nine years after we started, we have pushed the technology to an unprecedented level of maturity and performance. 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."
Sources
- PsiQuantum, "PsiQuantum Raises $1 Billion to Build Million-Qubit Scale, Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computers," 10 September 2025
- Quantum Computing Report, "PsiQuantum Raises $1 Billion to Build Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computers, Announces Collaboration with NVIDIA," September 2025
- Semafor, "Quantum Computing Startup PsiQuantum Raises Record $1B," 10 September 2025
- Optica & Photonics News, "PsiQuantum Raises US$1 Billion," September 2025
- Qatar Investment Authority, press release on Series E participation, September 2025
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