ZuriQ, a Swiss quantum computing company spun out of ETH Zürich, has raised $25.5 million in seed funding. The round was announced July 28, 2026. It builds on the company’s $4.2 million pre-seed round in 2025 and is led by Quantonation, with participation from Forward.one, Extantia, Firgun Ventures, and all previous round investors.
ZuriQ will use the capital to scale its trapped-ion quantum processors. The company has taken a two-dimensional approach to trapped-ion architecture, using Penning micro-traps and a static magnetic field in place of the oscillating fields most legacy designs rely on. This allows ions to move freely in any direction without the junctions that constrain reconfiguration in traditional one-dimensional chain architectures.
The company has demonstrated a working 3×3 array of nine individually controlled ions, built in collaboration with researchers at ETH Zürich. The chips were fabricated with manufacturing partner Infineon. ZuriQ has grown from four people to eighteen since its last investment, with new hires from IonQ, Xanadu, and Hamamatsu.
The new funding will go toward hiring, expanding the company’s research program, and scaling chip fabrication toward placing hundreds of qubits on a chip.
KEY QUOTES:
“What makes this approach powerful is geometry. Hold ions in a line and the count grows one at a time; hold them in two dimensions, and it grows with the area of the chip, on a standard chip, that is the difference between tens of ions and many thousands. Just as important, the ions can be moved freely in three dimensions, so they can be connected together far more flexibly, and that connectivity is what ultimately makes a quantum computer more capable. Reaching the scale and connectivity that real applications will need has been the central challenge for the whole field.”
Professor Jonathan Home, ETH Zürich, Scientific Adviser, ZuriQ
“A common misconception is that the quantum race is already decided, but that is far from reality. ZuriQ is demonstrating that there remain significant and transformational physics breakthroughs still to be made in Quantum architectures. The scientific caliber of the team is world-class, which is why ZuriQ has been phenomenally successful in attracting global talent to join them and build 2D-native quantum computers where trapped-ion qubits finally have the freedom to move and connect.”
Christophe Jurczak, Founding Partner, Quantonation
“The trapped-ion companies that started the race began with one-dimensional designs that were useful stepping-stones, but the real challenge is whether they can successfully pivot to two dimensions as they attempt to scale. We spent longer in the lab, and that time allowed us to identify an alternative route that is inherently easier to scale. Our architecture is two-dimensional from the ground up, so the number of qubits we can place on a chip will grow far more readily than in systems built on a legacy blueprint. This funding lets us turn our technical momentum into commercial scale with more people, more research, and an accelerated path to industrial applications.”
Dr. Pavel Hrmo, Co-Founder and CEO, ZuriQ
