ZuriQ has raised $25.5 million to expand its two-dimensional trapped-ion quantum chip technology.

ZuriQ is already making its chips with Infineon, giving the company a strong edge in manufacturing.

Quantonation led the seed round and says the quantum computing race is still wide open.

Pavel Hrmo recalls the initial challenges activating ZuriQ’s prototype ion trap. Early on, the device failed silently without any error message or indication of the faulty component. That slower, harder path is now paying off.

ZuriQ, a quantum computing company spun out of ETH Zürich, has raised $25.5 million in seed funding to scale a two-dimensional trapped-ion architecture it believes can outgrow the industry’s dominant design.

Quantonation led the round, with participation from Forward.one, Extantia, Firgun Ventures, and all previous investors. This follows the company’s $4.2 million pre-seed round in 2025 and brings total funding to $29.7 million.

“We spent longer in the lab, and that time allowed us to identify an alternative route that is inherently easier to scale … This funding lets us turn our technical momentum into commercial scale with more people, more research, and an accelerated path to industrial applications,” says Hrmo, ZuriQ’s co-founder and chief executive.

Why geometry matters

Quantum computing aims to combine enough qubits to solve problems beyond classical computers. Most trapped-ion machines, including those from IonQ and Quantinuum, arrange ions in one-dimensional chains and connect them with complex junctions to form larger grids. This approach becomes harder to scale as the number of ions grows.

ZuriQ, based in Zürich, Switzerland, was founded in 2023 by Hrmo, Tobias Sägesser, and Shreyans Jain, who worked in Professor Jonathan Home‘s lab.

The company’s Penning micro-traps use a static magnetic field instead of the oscillating electric fields in conventional designs, allowing ions to move freely in any direction without junctions.

“Hold ions in a line and the count grows one at a time; hold them in two dimensions, and it grows with the chip’s area. On a standard chip, that is the difference between tens of ions and many thousands,” adds Home, a scientific adviser to ZuriQ.

The company’s demonstrator, developed in 18 months, controls a three-by-three array of nine individually addressed ions.

An industrial manufacturing edge

ZuriQ’s chips are fabricated with Infineon, showing the design can be produced using established semiconductor industry processes. This sets ZuriQ apart from competitors still relying on lab-only fabrication methods.

The startup has grown from four to 18 employees since its pre-seed round, hiring talent from IonQ, Xanadu, and Hamamatsu. The new funding will support more hiring, expand research, and scale chip fabrication to enable hundreds of qubits on a single chip.

Quantonation, based in Paris, has previously backed quantum companies including Pasqal and Diraq.

“A common misconception is that the quantum race is already decided, but that is far from reality … The scientific calibre of the team is world-class, which is why ZuriQ has been phenomenally successful in attracting global talent to join them and build 2D-native quantum computers where trapped-ion qubits finally have the freedom to move and connect,” notes Christophe Jurczak, founding partner at Quantonation.

The scaling question is still open

McKinsey estimates quantum computing could become a $1.3 trillion industry within a decade, but no architecture has demonstrated the ability to scale to the thousands of qubits needed for industrial applications.

Competitors like IonQ, which acquired Oxford Ionics in a £1.075 billion deal, and Quantinuum, which filed for a Nasdaq IPO valued up to $20 billion, are commercially ahead.

ZuriQ is counting on its two-dimensional design to scale up faster than one-dimensional methods. The industry is watching to see if technical patience can beat an early lead in the market.