ZuriQ raises $25.5 million to scale new groundbreaking 2D quantum architecture

ZuriQ, a Swiss quantum computing company spun out of ETH Zürich, today announced it has raised $25.5 million in seed funding to scale its trapped-ion quantum processors. The round builds on the company’s $4.2 million pre-seed round in 2025 and is led by Quantonation, with participation from Forward.oneExtantiaFirgun Ventures, and all previous round investors. ZuriQ will use the new capital to expand its team alongside research and development efforts as it works to significantly increase the number of qubits its architecture can support.

Most trapped-ion quantum computers are built on an architecture first proposed more than two decades ago, in which ions are held in essentially one-dimensional chains stitched together into larger grids using complex junction structures. ZuriQ has taken a fundamentally different route with processors that are natively two-dimensional. Using Penning micro-traps, the company uses a static magnetic field in place of the rapidly oscillating fields most legacy architectures rely on, replaces the oscillating fields of conventional designs with a static magnetic field, allowing ions to move freely in any direction without the junctions that constrain reconfiguration.

ZuriQ is proving out its native two-dimensional architecture with a working demonstrator – successfully developed in just 18 months. The demonstrator comprises a 3×3 array of nine individually controlled ions, the largest two-dimensional array of its kind demonstrated to date, built in collaboration with researchers at ETH Zürich. The chips behind it were fabricated with ZuriQ’s manufacturing partner, Infineon, showing the design can be produced with established industry processes.

With the architecture and its manufacturing route established, the company’s focus now turns to scale: rapidly increasing the number of ions on a chip to enable powerful, commercially useful machines. Since its last investment, ZuriQ has grown from four people to eighteen. The company has attracted world-class talent with backgrounds from leading quantum and photonics organizations, including IonQ, Xanadu, and Hamamatsu. The new capital will go toward further hiring, expanding the company’s research program, and scaling up chip fabrication – the groundwork for putting hundreds of qubits on a chip.

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