A UK silicon spin qubit company closes an extension round with backers including Sony and imec

[Daedalus84]

Quantum Motion has finalized the second close of its Series C funding round, adding new and returning strategic backers including imec.ventures, Lansdowne Partners, Sony Innovation Fund, S3 Ventures, and Inkef alongside existing co-leads DCVC and Kembara. The company builds dense silicon spin qubit architectures fabricated inside standard commercial semiconductor foundries rather than specialized dedicated manufacturing lines, working with partners including imec and GlobalFoundries on 300mm CMOS wafer fabrication.

The pitch behind that manufacturing choice is fundamentally about cost and scale rather than raw qubit performance alone. By using standard CMOS processes already running at massive scale for conventional chips, Quantum Motion projects hardware unit costs in the single digit millions of dollars per system, alongside a targeted hundredfold reduction in physical rack footprint and a thousandfold decrease in energy consumption compared to competing approaches. Those are genuinely dramatic claimed improvements if they hold up once systems actually ship at scale.

The funding supports an international expansion that includes a new US research laboratory in Maryland, alongside continued work under Stage B of DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, which is putting eleven different hardware approaches through a structured evaluation process. The company already delivered a full stack silicon CMOS quantum computer to the UK's National Quantum Computing Centre earlier this year, so this extension is explicitly framed as accelerating industrial scale up rather than funding a first proof of concept.

Sony Innovation Fund's involvement is a slightly unusual name to see in a quantum hardware round compared to the more typical roster of deep tech and government adjacent investors that usually dominate this space. Its presence alongside more traditional quantum focused backers suggests at least some consumer electronics companies are starting to take a direct financial position in the underlying hardware race rather than just watching from the sidelines

Quantum Motion Finalizes Second Close of Series C Funding Round for Silicon QPU Scaling - Quantum Computing Reportquantumcomputingreport.com