2025 has already been packed with announcements and controversies — and we couldn’t be more excited! Between Jensen Huang’s stock-sinking comments, Microsoft’s ‘we’ve-said-it-before-but-this-time-it’s-for-real’ world-first and hundreds of millions in funding raining on the industry, we’ve had a blast following the news lately — and we’re only in March… So here is our take on the news that shook the quantum world these last few weeks.
TL;DR:
- QuEra raised over $230M, backed by SoftBank and Google Quantum AI, joining the “three-digit club” of quantum hardware startups that have raised a $100M+ fundraising round.
- Microsoft announced Majorana 1, the “first” quantum chip leveraging Majorana zero modes but the scientific paper in Nature behind the announcement is more cautious.
- PsiQuantum is reportedly raising $750M — a new record for private quantum firms. Going all in on photonics, skipping intermediate milestones, and going straight for a million-qubit fault-tolerant system.
- D-Wave claimed quantum supremacy with its Advantage2 system simulating spin glasses. It was peer-reviewed in Science, but experts quickly questioned its scale and relevance.
More quantum companies hit the 3 digits — but not the ones you think.
Beyond the technical breakthroughs and bold claims, the past few weeks have also marked a turning point on the funding front. Since January, two more companies — namely Alice & Bob and QuEra Computing — joined the highly exclusive club of quantum processor manufacturers to raise a three-digit round. France positions two startups in fastest companies to raise 100M€+ round.
In fact, QuEra didn’t just join the club — it set the bar high, kicking things off with a $200M+ round. That’s quite a landmark, as only five other firms in the industry have reached it — or just two, if you exclude the publicly traded ones.
In a bold move that underscores the growing investor appetite for quantum innovation, the Boston-based company secured over $230 million in its latest round. This substantial infusion — with $60 million contingent on milestone achievements — drew heavyweight backers including Google’s Quantum AI unit or SoftBank, alongside steadfast support from existing investors.
These kinds of numbers are still unusual in quantum, and truly exciting. We guess Europe won’t lag for long, and a startup from the Nordics may soon join the 200M€-round club. Investors still believe quantum is a great market, but funds are converging towards existing companies.
Microsoft Majorana: hype or hope?
Pardon our French (we’re allowed, we’re actually French) if we came off a bit harsh in the intro, but it’s not the first time that the Redmond firm has overstated a quantum-related achievement. But let’s get back to the facts: for about a decade now, Microsoft has been doing research on Majorana zero modes (MZM or just Majorana). An MZM refers to a state of certain one-dimensional quantum materials (like nanowires) which, if achieved, could enable the formation of a topological qubit, a qubit believed to be extremely stable and highly protected against errors. This type of qubit — still entirely theoretical — would drastically reduce qubit overhead compared to other superconducting architectures.
In a widely discussed mid-February press release, Microsoft announced the release of its Majorana 1 chip, the alleged world’s first quantum chip leveraging Majorana particles. This announcement, which suggested that Microsoft finally had obtained a topological qubit, emphasized the fact that they had found a path to scaling their quantum chip to a million qubits, and that they would be able to solve industrial problems “in years, not decades”.
Immediately, scientists preferred to focus on the paper in Nature that followed rather than the carefully composed press release. The paper itself is much more cautious about the true milestones reached: it appears that, as impressive as MS Azure Quantum scientists’ work is, it doesn’t prove the detection of MZM, much less the functional use of a topological qubit on the chip. Instead, it describes a genuinely novel “device architecture that might enable fusion experiments using future MZMs”. Not the same thing indeed…
Yet, the achievement detailed in the paper marks a major and genuinely impressive step forward. In our view, that’s precisely why it’s unfortunate that the announcement leaned too heavily into headline-worthy claims — it risks distracting from the real scientific substance and fuels skepticism at a time when the field deserves recognition for its progress. This balance between substance and storytelling is something the entire field continues to navigate. D-Wave, for instance, recently made headlines with an announcement that, while boldly framed, was underpinned by a truly impressive technical result. More on this later in the article.
PsiQuantum: Thinking in factories, not labs.
While rivals push for fault-tolerance, PsiQuantum is doubling down on its moonshot, being reportedly on the verge of breaking the record for the largest VC round in quantum — again.
The California-based photonic quantum computing company is said to be raising a staggering $750 million round led by BlackRock, according to informed sources — a raise that would push its valuation past $6 billion and reaffirm its status as the most capitalized private company in the field.
But PsiQuantum doesn’t follow the typical startup playbook. While quantum computing efforts globally are largely focused on lab-scale prototypes or early-stage, single-system deployments, PsiQuantum is going all-in on one audacious goal: to build a fault-tolerant, million-qubit quantum computer by harnessing industrial-scale semiconductor manufacturing and dedicated quantum compute centers — and it’s doing so on multiple continents.
In Australia, it has already secured $620 million in public funding from federal and state governments to build a utility-scale quantum system in Brisbane, complete with a cryogenic plant and a 50,000-square-meter facility. Meanwhile in the U.S., it’s partnering with Illinois and the City of Chicago to build another site, supported by over $500 million in public funding and incentives, further positioning itself as a sovereign tech asset.
These multi-hundred-million-dollar infrastructure bets are wildly outsized by quantum standards and reflect PsiQuantum’s ethos: bypass incremental milestones, bet big on photonics, and industrialize quantum at scale — or not at all.
D-Wave: What is true supremacy?
The Palo Alto–based firm, listed on the NYSE and historically focused on quantum annealers rather than gate-based quantum computers, made headlines with a bold claim: it had achieved quantum supremacy. It all started on March 12th, with the publication of a paper in Science, accompanied by a press release announcing that D-Wave’s flagship system, Advantage2, had performed a complex yet concrete simulation of the quantum dynamics of magnetic materials — namely spin glasses — in minutes. The announcement states that Frontier, the most powerful supercomputer in existence, would take nearly a million years to solve the same problem — and, in doing so, consume more energy than the world’s annual electricity consumption. As Alan Baratz, D-Wave’s CEO, puts it: “Supremacy, true supremacy, hadn’t been achieved yet”, and this experiment is “that demonstration of true supremacy.”
By now, everyone knows the drill — it didn’t take long for scientists around the world to challenge D-Wave’s claim. In fact, as with Microsoft’s paper, the Science publication was far more cautious than the press release, opting for the term ‘quantum advantage’ (meaning faster than classical) rather than ‘supremacy’ (beyond classical capabilities). In response to counter-papers, notably from NYU and EPFL, D-Wave representatives were quick to address the criticism, arguing that the rebuttals involved smaller-scale simulations than theirs.
In our view, these recurring debates around quantum supremacy always seem to follow the same script — ultimately boiling down to two key questions: Is the problem being solved relevant to a real-world industry use case? And is it a problem whose classical solution truly scales worse than linearly with size — the kind that actually demands quantum speedup? Our limited expertise keeps us from answering these definitively in the case of D-Wave’s latest claim, but it seems that true quantum supremacy, to borrow Mr. Baratz’s words, can’t afford to take no for an answer on either front.
Appendix — ‘Three-digit club’ funding trajectories since inception.
