QuantWare Raises $178 Million Series B to Build Industrial-Scale Quantum Processors, Announces 10,000-Qubit Architecture
Dutch quantum chip firm QuantWare closes a record $178M Series B to scale its VIO processor platform and open KiloFab, the world's largest dedicated quantum foundry.
Overview
QuantWare, the Dutch quantum processor company spun out of TU Delft’s QuTech research institute, announced on May 5, 2026 that it has raised $178 million (€152 million) in a Series B round — the largest private funding round ever raised by a dedicated quantum processor company, according to QuantWare’s announcement. The round was heavily oversubscribed and attracted new backers Intel Capital, In-Q-Tel (IQT), and ETF Partners, alongside returning investors FORWARD.one, Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, InnovationQuarter Capital, Ground State Ventures, and Graduate Ventures.
The capital will fund two parallel initiatives: the VIO-40K™ processor architecture, designed to reach 10,000 qubits per chip, and KiloFab, billed as the world’s largest dedicated quantum open-architecture fabrication facility.
What We Know
A Record Round for a Quantum Chip Foundry
Founded in 2021 by Matt Rijlaarsdam and Alessandro Bruno, QuantWare describes itself as “the only company that designs, fabricates, and integrates modular quantum processors on an open architecture at an industrial scale,” as stated in its company press release. The company has shipped working quantum processors to more than 50 customers across 20 countries, making it the world’s largest commercial QPU supplier by volume.
Rijlaarsdam framed the funding in terms of a broader industry imperative: “The promise of quantum computing, capable of solving humanity’s intractable challenges, can only happen once it can be manufactured and deployed at scale,” according to Electronics Weekly.
VIO-40K: Breaking the 100-Qubit Ceiling
A persistent bottleneck in superconducting quantum computing has been I/O routing — the physical challenge of wiring control signals into cryogenic chips. Standard processor designs face a practical ceiling of around 100 qubits because routing more signal lines into a dilution refrigerator becomes prohibitively complex. According to TAMradar’s funding analysis, QuantWare’s VIO™ 3D architecture routes 40,000 signal lines within a 15x15cm module, enabling processors that can reach 10,000 qubits in single cryostats.
The VIO-40K™, unveiled alongside the funding announcement, is a new processor architecture designed to reach 10,000 qubits — described by QuantWare as “100x larger than the state of the art today.” Initial VIO-40K shipments are expected in 2028, according to TAMradar.
Kike Miralles of Intel Capital explained the technical reasoning behind the investment: “In superconducting quantum computing, scale is increasingly constrained by routing, packaging, and manufacturability — not just qubit design,” he told The Quantum Insider. “QuantWare recognized that early and built VIO to address it. That combination of technical ambition and execution positions them to become the company on which the future of superconducting quantum systems will be built,” he added, as quoted by SiliconAngle.
The company offers two product lines: the A-Line, aimed at surface code error correction applications, and the D-Line, targeting NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) workloads, according to TAMradar. The platform also supports NVIDIA NVQLink integration for hybrid quantum-classical computing.
KiloFab: Scaling Production 20x
Alongside the processor architecture, QuantWare is building KiloFab — described in the company’s press release as “the world’s largest dedicated quantum open architecture fabrication facility.” The new facility will increase the company’s production capacity by 20x to meet what it describes as strong global customer demand.
Rijlaarsdam said in the announcement: “VIO-40K will deliver 10,000-qubit processors on an open architecture that the entire ecosystem can build on, and KiloFab gives us the industrial production capacity to meet rapidly growing global demand.”
J.D. Englehart, Senior Director at IQT (In-Q-Tel), noted: “QuantWare has both the breakthrough scaling technology in VIO, as well as the requisite industrial capability in KiloFab,” as quoted in the QuantWare press release.
Robin van Boxsel, a General Partner at FORWARD.one, added: “The QuantWare team has that drive, and with their VIO technology, they hold the key to leading the high-growth quantum industry.”
Open-Architecture Model
A distinctive element of QuantWare’s strategy is its open-architecture foundry model. Rather than building quantum computers for end users only, the company supplies processors to a wide ecosystem — quantum computing companies, national technology institutes, and major technology conglomerates — under a model SiliconAngle compared to TSMC’s role in classical semiconductor manufacturing.
The company’s leadership team combines academic and industry backgrounds. Rijlaarsdam and Bruno co-founded QuantWare out of TU Delft, where QuTech is one of the world’s leading quantum research centers. The advisory board includes Rami Barends from Google Quantum AI and Charles M. Marcus, while Aparna Prabhakar, a former Vice President at IBM Quantum, serves on the board, according to TAMradar.
What We Don’t Know
QuantWare has not disclosed the specific customers that will receive the first VIO-40K processors in 2028, nor whether the 10,000-qubit target refers to physical or logical qubits. The company has not shared details on the pricing model for KiloFab foundry services or the location of the new facility. The market size figures cited by analysts — including projections of the quantum computing sector reaching $18.33 billion by 2034 at a 31.6% compound annual growth rate — reflect forecasts rather than confirmed outcomes.
Analysis
QuantWare’s raise stands out not just for its size but for its framing: the company is positioning itself as an infrastructure layer rather than an application-layer quantum computing vendor. The open-architecture foundry model is a deliberate bet that the quantum computing ecosystem will benefit from a shared fabrication layer the way the semiconductor industry benefited from TSMC — separating chip design from chip manufacturing to allow each to scale independently.
The routing bottleneck that VIO addresses is a real and widely-acknowledged constraint in superconducting quantum computing. Whether 40,000 signal lines in a 15x15cm module at cryogenic temperatures will prove sufficient to sustain a 10,000-qubit system without prohibitive decoherence remains to be demonstrated at scale. The 2028 shipment target for VIO-40K gives the company roughly two years to deliver on a milestone that would represent a roughly two-order-of-magnitude jump from today’s leading commercial systems.