Quantum Source, an Israel-based company developing the technology needed to bring photonic quantum computers to market, announced today it has raised a $12M seed extension investment round led by Dell Technologies Capital with participation from 10D as well as existing investors Eclipse VC, Grove Ventures, and Pitango First. The extension brings Quantum Source’s seed round total to $27M, one of the largest total seed financings in the field of Quantum Computing.
This additional $12M financing round will be used to expand the research and development team as the company scales to reach significant technical and performance milestones.
Founded in 2021 by a team of semiconductor industry veterans and accomplished physicists, Quantum Source is developing technology to enable the efficient implementation of large scale, fault-tolerant, photonic quantum computers. To date, companies have built small quantum computers with just tens or hundreds of qubits. While these rudimentary quantum computers are truly groundbreaking technology, the systems are not yet commercially viable.
Quantum Source aims to build fault-tolerant quantum systems that scale to millions of qubits and that will have the potential to unleash dramatic acceleration in numerous cutting edge fields that include drug design, material development, cybersecurity, and the processing of large datasets for AI applications.
“We founded Quantum Source with the belief that photonic quantum technologies are the best route to achieve large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers. Our unique approach will dramatically improve the scalability of those machines and will be the key to commercial success of quantum computers,” said Oded Melamed, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Source. “Having investors such as Dell Technologies Capital believe in us will allow us to accelerate our work and by extension, entire industries.”
Quantum Source is led by four co-founders: CEO Oded Melamed; VP of R&D, Gil Semo; Chief Scientist Prof. Barak Dayan; and Chairman Dan Charash. The senior leadership has successfully co-founded, scaled, and sold deeply technical companies to Apple, Broadcom, and Sony. With more than 170 articles published among them, the broader team is composed of 18 PhDs in either physics or electrical engineering from esteemed universities including Caltech, Columbia University, MIT, Weismann Institute of Science, and Yale University.
“DTC invests in technologies that can move industries forward. 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,” said Omri Green, partner at Dell Technologies Capital. “Oded and this exceptional team of scientists and proven entrepreneurs are addressing crucial hurdles in photonic quantum – scalability and fault tolerance. Once those challenges are solved, the innovation upside will be boundless.”
Photonic quantum computing is a type of quantum computing that uses photons as a representation of qubits. Quantum Source utilizes a unique approach for generating photons and quantum gates that is five orders of magnitude more efficient than state-of-the-art implementation.