Meet the companies racing to build quantum chips

Summary

Quantum computing has long been announced as “just around the corner,” but several companies are now determined to make this a commercial reality, with the promise of solving complex problems beyond classical computers’ reach. The problems in question are wide-ranging, from medicine and cybersecurity to materials science and chemistry. But first, there are very practical problems to be solved, such as developing chips that can reliably host large numbers of qubits — short for quantum bits, the fundamental unit of information in quantum computing. As usual in a high-stakes tech race with an uncertain time horizon, tech giants such as Google and Microsoft are at the forefront. Yet startups are also set to play an important role, especially tackling bottlenecks like connectivity and error correction that are critical for scaling quantum systems. But some startups and smaller tech companies are taking on the chip challenge head-on, and deserve mention alongside the more attention-grabbing efforts from industry giants. While Big Tech projects typically boast the highest qubit counts, rethinking designs from first principles and using different approaches could yield equally promising results. Here are some of the companies behind the main quantum chip projects that are worth tracking: Akhetonics Akhetonics is a German photonics startup working on an all-optical, general purpose chip — a contrarian bet in a field where most focus on narrower applications. This bold version and its first-principles approach helped the company raise a €6 million seed funding round led by Matterwave Ventures in November 2024. Alice & Bob Alice & Bob is a French startup that raised a $104 million Series B round of funding in January 2025 to continue working toward building a “fault tolerant” quantum computer. Unlike companies focusing only on chips, Alice & Bob is developing a full quantum computing system. To do so, it relies on cat qubits, a type of superconducting qubits designed to reduce...