QuantWare raises €152M to build its KiloFab chip factory

A Dutch quantum startup has just closed the largest private funding round ever secured by a dedicated quantum-processor company worldwide. Delft-based QuantWare announced a €152 million ($178 million) Series B that is also the largest ever raised by a Dutch deeptech company. The oversubscribed round attracted heavyweight new investors including Intel Capital, In-Q-Tel (the CIA-backed strategic investor), and ETF Partners, joining an existing syndicate of FORWARD.one, Invest-NL Deep Tech Fonds, InnovationQuarter Capital, Ground State Ventures, and Graduate Ventures.

This is the second European quantum scale-up Series B this week and, by a significant margin, the larger of the two.

QuantWare was founded in July 2021 by CEO Matthijs Rijlaarsdam and CTO Dr. Alessandro Bruno, both alumni of QuTech, the quantum research institute run jointly by TU Delft and TNO. The company has already shipped working quantum processors to over 50 organizations across 20 countries, making it the world’s largest commercial supplier of quantum processors by volume, according to both its own framing and HPCwire.

What sets QuantWare apart is its architectural choice. Most superconducting-qubit systems use 2D chip designs where signal lines route laterally across a single processor’s surface, an approach that consumes space exponentially as qubit counts grow and has capped commercial systems at modest scale. QuantWare’s VIO architecture is three-dimensional: chiplet modules are stacked vertically and connected through ultra-high-fidelity chip-to-chip links, with signal lines running between layers rather than across them. This approach scales the way commercial semiconductor processes have always scaled.

The Series B follows QuantWare’s late-April announcement of VIO-40K, a new architecture generation rated for processors with 10,000 qubits. That is roughly 100 times the current commercial state of the art, and the architecture supports up to 40,000 input-output lines through the chiplet-stack approach. Quantum Computing Report described the design as the first credible commercial path to processors of that scale that does not rely on networking together many smaller systems, which introduces its own latency and fidelity costs. Reservations for VIO-40K are available now, with first customer shipments expected in 2028.

Most of the new capital will fund KiloFab, which QuantWare describes as the world’s first dedicated fab for Quantum Open Architecture devices and one of the largest quantum-processor production facilities anywhere. Located at the company’s Delft headquarters, KiloFab is intended to expand production capacity by roughly 20 times. Every other major quantum-computing company either fabricates its own processors in vertically integrated facilities or buys from a small set of academic-scale fabs with limited capacity. KiloFab is designed to break that constraint by operating as an open-architecture commercial supplier to the wider industry. If QuantWare sustains this open-supplier role, it occupies a structurally similar position in quantum to what TSMC occupies in classical semiconductors: not the brand the customer sees, but the fabrication operation everyone else’s brand depends on.

QuantWare’s customer mix is unusually broad for this stage of the industry, selling to national technology institutes, large technology companies, and other commercial quantum-computing firms across 20 countries. Most quantum hardware companies sell predominantly to local or single-region customers, and this geographic spread suggests QuantWare’s open-architecture proposition appeals to buyers who want to control their own quantum-software stack rather than buy a vertically integrated system.

The investor configuration reflects the same dynamic. Intel Capital’s participation is partly a strategic hedge: Intel itself has been pursuing trapped-ion quantum research, and a stake in the leading commercial superconducting-QPU supplier gives Intel optionality across architectures. In-Q-Tel’s involvement signals US-government-adjacent customer interest. ETF Partners’ climate-oriented investment thesis ties into the energy efficiency of QuantWare’s chiplet approach, which the company says delivers exponentially more compute per watt than competing scaling strategies.

Existing investors also matter. General partner Robin van Boxsel framed FORWARD.one’s continued participation as supporting QuantWare’s path “to becoming one of the world’s most important technology companies.” Yvonne Greeuw at Invest-NL framed the deal as a contribution to Dutch “strategic autonomy and future earnings capacity,” language that, when applied to a private financing round, signals the Dutch state reads this as an industrial-policy outcome.

Three broader implications follow. First, European deeptech can now attract Series B rounds at a scale historically associated with US Series Cs and Ds. €152 million is not a US-style late-stage round, but it is the largest such round any Dutch deeptech company has closed, suggesting the European ceiling for hardware-led deeptech financings has moved up materially. Second, quantum computing has finally attracted strategic-investor capital from outside the dedicated quantum-VC pool. Intel Capital and In-Q-Tel are not quantum-thesis funds, and their participation alongside ETF Partners’ climate-thesis cheque suggests the quantum sector has crossed a threshold from speculative-research investment into adjacent strategic interest. Third, Europe has been talking about “sovereign” quantum infrastructure for years with limited concrete output. QuantWare’s KiloFab is a real building with real capital behind it, designed to be the world’s largest open-architecture quantum-processor production facility. If it operates as planned, the Netherlands will host one of the most strategically consequential commercial-quantum operations in the world.

CEO Rijlaarsdam kept the message simple. “Quantum computers will help solve humanity’s biggest challenges, but only if they can be built at industrial scale,” he said. “That is exactly what we’re working on.” The Series B has now provided the capital. The 2028 first-shipment commitment provides the deadline. Between those two dates, what was until recently a TU Delft research project becomes either the European semiconductor success story of the decade or a cautionary tale about the limits of architectural ambition. The investors backing it have seen enough of the engineering to bet on the first outcome. What follows is execution.