Diraq Secures USD $15 Million in Series A-2 Funding
Insider Brief
- Diraq announced the successful completion of a Series A-2 capital raise of USD $15 million.
- The round was led by Quantonation and with participation from Higgins Family Investments and the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
- The latest round brings the total funding of Diraq’s technology to USD $120 million.
PRESS RELEASE — Diraq, a global leader in quantum computing based on silicon quantum dots, today announced the successful completion of a Series A-2 capital raise of USD $15 million. The raise will advance the company’s cutting-edge research and development initiatives to unleash the full economic and commercial potential of quantum computing.
The round was led by specialist investor Quantonation, the world’s first venture capital fund dedicated to quantum technologies, with participation from Higgins Family Investments and the University of New South Wales, Sydney. The round extends the previously announced Series A round of USD $20 million led by technology investor Allectus Capital bringing the total funding of Diraq’s technology to USD $120 million, including research funding from Australian and U.S. government programs.
“This new funding will be used to expand our talented team in Australia and launch in the U.S. as well as capitalise on our existing international partnerships,” said Andrew Dzurak, CEO and founder of Diraq. “To see useful quantum computing deployed cost-efficiently in a commercial timeframe will require billions of qubits. We are working closely with our foundry partners to drive qubit development based on tried and tested CMOS techniques coupled with our proprietary designs. We are focused on delivering energy-efficient processors with billions of qubits on one chip contained in one refrigerator, rather than thousands of chips and refrigerators requiring hundreds of square metres of space in a warehouse.”
“We are excited to lead Diraq’s Series A-2 round as the company continues to evolve as a key player in the global silicon quantum ecosystem,” said Will Zeng, a Quantonation partner who will join Diraq’s board. “The primary technical focus in the next 18 months will be on the development of a device through a standard semiconductor foundry. This milestone will serve as a proof point, solidifying the viability of Diraq’s technology and propelling the company’s ambitious scale-up program aimed at constructing the most powerful quantum computers in the world.”
“This funding round shows international recognition of our capabilities and potential impact,” said Diraq’s U.S.-based chairman, the Hon. William Jeffrey, former Director of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). “There is a key advantage to our technology which is based on modified transistors – the same components that fuel the digital world and are integral to our daily lives. As one of the few global companies pursuing the ambitious goal of achieving millions of qubits on a single chip, we can leverage over 50 years and trillions of dollars of investment in the semiconductor industry.”
Diraq is dedicated to building a full-stack quantum computer that bypasses the current era of large, error-ridden systems and moves the industry directly to fault-tolerant computing. The company’s spin-based technology in silicon has demonstrated qubit control with sufficient fidelity to allow for scalable error correction, including breakthroughs last year.
By taking on the complete process from quantum hardware through to the application layer, Diraq aims to bring the transformative power of quantum computing to a variety of industries with a powerful, cost-effective and compact quantum processor to help solve the world’s most challenging problems.