Oxford quantum computing spinout announces $100M funding round led by Japan’s SBI

Oxford University physics spinout Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) recently announced the launch of Toshiko, a 32-qubit quantum computing services platform, alongside a $100-million Series B funding round led by Japan’s SBI Group’s investment arm.

The company claims that Toshiko is the “world’s first enterprise ready quantum computing platform.”

Great question! We are out of the lab and have deployed in colocation data centres, + there are multiple OQC Toshiko’s to serve enterprise data needs. We’ve detailed what makes our offering so unique in our whitepaper, which you can access here.https://t.co/lXBSOZcRiH

— OQC (@OxfordQCircuits) November 27, 2023

OQC is working in partnership with Equinix, Nvidia, Amazon Web Service and McKinsey to “bring quantum out of the lab” and pave the way for “quantum advantage.”

Quantum advantage is a point of technological refinement at which a quantum computer is capable of solving a problem that no traditional binary computer could solve within a feasible amount of time.

There have been numerous claims of quantum advantage in the past decade, most notably by both Google and IBM, but, as of now, there is no industry-wide consensus.

While most quantum computing systems are still considered experimental, the onset of hybrid and cloud-based classical/quantum systems and the arrival of the industry’s first on-site commercial quantum platforms have led the sector to focus on enterprise solutions.

Tim Costa, director of HPC and quantum at Nvidia, said in a press release:

“Addressing the grand challenges of tomorrow requires the seamless integration of quantum with the GPU-accelerated supercomputing of today. By combining OQC Toshiko with the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip through NVIDIA CUDA Quantum, a platform for integrated quantum-classical computing, OQC can better empower businesses and researchers to make breakthroughs across industries and in critical scientific domains.”

OQC is also announcing the launch of a $100-million Series B round. The fund raise will be led by Japan’s SBI Investments and will be joined by Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE), University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners (UTEC), Lansdowne Partners, and OTIF.

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The company previously raised approximately $43 million in Series A funding. According to OQC, both its Series A and Series B funding rounds represented the largest respective quantum computing startup funding rounds in United Kingdom history.