Sydney quantum startup Diraq has chalked up another $10 million in funding through an expanded Series A as the company continues its efforts to develop the world’s first fully error-corrected quantum computer.
The company announced the additional funding on Tuesday, taking the total Series A2 round led by Frech venture capital fund Quantonation from $23 million to more than $33 million.
Main Sequence Ventures, Taronga Ventures, Uniseed, UniSuper, Co:Act Capital and existing investor and research partner, UNSW, have invested in Diraq since the round was first announced in February.
The Series A is now valued at more than $63 million, while total investment in the company, including through Australian and US research grants, sits at around $194 million.
Diraq plans to use the funding to expanding its Australian team, launching in the US and strengthen existing international partnerships. The first part of the Series A — around $30 million — came when the company was spun out of UNSW in 2022.
The latest expansion of the funding round comes after Diraq revealed it had set a new record in terms of controls accuracy for qubits using its technology – a key quantum computing proof point, according to found Andrew Dzurak.
The technical milestone keeps the company on track to build a fully error-corrected quantum computer by the end of 2028, potentially ahead of other local and international players.
Diraq combines existing silicon hardware with its patented complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) qubits, an approach that differs to Silicon Quantum Computing and PsiQuantum.
PsiQuantum, which has secured almost $940 million in equity and loans from the federal and Queensland governments, is targeting 2027 for quantum computer, which uses photons as a representation of qubits instead of electrons.
Main Sequence Ventures managing partner Bill Bartee said the company’s “breakthroughs are a testament to Australia’s leading position globally in quantum computing”.
“The world-class team, patent portfolio, and unique approach should advance the field by bringing scalable, spin-based quantum computers into the real world,” Mr Bartee said.
Avi Naidu, co-founder and managing partner at Taronga Ventures, added that Diraq’s technology has the potential to “significantly impact the real asset sector, representing a step change toward the next generation of data infrastructure”.
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