Lexi Quirk

Top quantum headlines and raises this week: 1/ Universal Quantum raises $100M+ Series A (DCVC and Firgun Ventures co-lead) Billed as the largest Series A ever raised by a UK quantum company. Proceeds fund its interconnect technology, a new Singapore R&D center, and expansion in the US, Japan and Hamburg. The company is also delivering a $77M contract for the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Co-investors include EDBI, Artal, Main Sequence and Nauta Capital, so it is a well-capitalized modular-ion contender. 2/ QuantrolOx raises €12M Series A2 (IW Capital lead, EIC Fund co-invest) Total funding is now about $31M. It opened a Berkeley, CA office and signed a five-year collaboration with UC Berkeley, which signals a US push around control software and training. Note that the round shows investors backing the software and workforce layer, not just qubit hardware. 3/ Coherence Quantum raises €2.78M seed (Lifeline Ventures lead; Mårten Mickos participates). It targets cryogenic wiring, heat and signal-conditioning limits inside the cryostat, one of the practical bottlenecks to scaling solid-state qubit systems. 4/ Quantum X Labs launches end-to-end QEC program at the Israeli Quantum Computing Center (operated by Quantum Machines). The program runs on the Arbel superconducting processor and links noise characterization, control systems and a noise-aware decoder under development. First hardware experiments have started. 5/ NIST publishes post-quantum cryptography transition guidance (NISTIR 8547)

Some big moves in quantum in the first few weeks of October: DARPA advanced four more companies to QBI Stage C, Oratomic announced a $475M Series B at a $5.4B valuation (three months after announcing its $300M Series A), and IonQ agreed to buy Elisity for up to $1.3B. 🧵

I am excited to start sharing more about the areas that have been catching my attention from an investment standpoint. First, quantum. The industry’s momentum is real, and the 3-5 year timeline for quantum advantage may finally be coming into view. Thank you, Spencer Fallek, for breaking down the near-term applications so clearly. This has been a core focus of mine alongside our Deep Tech team, and Spencer's company represents our first investment in the space. Second, inference. Like everyone else, I keep getting blown away by how fast its use is growing. Thank you, Natalie, for talking about @gimletlabs and how you're solving latency problems. Their progress has been incredible to watch.

I am excited to announce our investment in @lightsprintai When Opus 4.5 came out, it completely changed how our Prod/Eng team worked at 645. We had been talking about the emerging role of a "product architect," but that release made it all possible. However, as we all became product architects, we started working in silos... That's why I was immediately excited when I saw the demo for @lightsprintai. 1/ It has an incredible engineering team behind it; Ben Chan literally built the engineering team at BitGo 2/ The product brought collaboration back; we could see each other's work without annoying staging deploys or even local setups 3/ It improved our creativity; we could iterate on our codebase, and we immediately got rid of Lovable 4/ It empowered the entire team. One of our engineers said, "This is the best tool I have used since Claude." And even better, we have people who have never shipped before (who don't even know what shipping means) shipping We are still avid users and look forward to building more in public with this team.