ETH Zurich spinout raises $4.2m to scale trapped ion quantum computer

A spinout of ETH Zurich in Switzerland has raised $4.2m to scale the production of trapped ion quantum computer systems to thousands of qubits.

The seed funding round for ZuriQ was led by Founderful with participation from SquareOne, First Momentum Ventures, OnSight Ventures and QAI Ventures.

Trapped ions have been increasingly popular for quantum computer designs such as IoQ in the US and UK/US firm Quantinuum which uses light to manage the trapped ions in devices from Infineon Technologies. Trapped ion quantum computer systems have shown world-record performance, long coherence times and long-range connectivity. But these systems face a fundamental challenge: they struggle to dramatically scale up the number of physical qubits, relying on one-dimensional chains with hard physical limitations that prevent scaling.

• Quantinuum to build photonic quantum R&D centre
• IonQ to set up quantum data centre in Switzerland
• Infineon teams for trapped ion processors

“The space for few-qubit devices that act as toy models is already saturated,” said Pavel Hrmo, CEO of ZuriQ. “Devices with 20-40 qubits won’t drive large profits. We need to focus on long-term scalability and demonstrate that our platform can grow the number of ions in two dimensions faster than our competitors.”

The technology changes how ions are trapped, moving from purely electric fields to a combination of electric and magnetic fields. This allows ions to move in all spatial directions rather than 2D chains. The freedom to move the ions in multiple dimensions is the key step to unlock the performance of these systems at scale. 

The technology emerged from the ETH labs of Prof. Home, where founders Pavel Hrmo, Tobias Sägesser, and Shreyans Jain built a novel setup housing a microfabricated ion trap, called a Penning trap, in a large superconducting magnet.

A key factor Importantly, the re-design maintains compatibility with the proven control techniques developed by the trapped-ion academic community. The company is on-track to demonstrate its first prototype late this year that it says will have dozens of ions in a reconfigurable 2-d grid.

“We have been highly impressed by the speed of execution of ZuriQ’s founding team and the pace of progress towards technical milestones that have been elusive in the community so far,” said Pascal Mathis, Partner at Founderful. 

ZuriQ is aiming to build complete ion trap quantum computer systems for both direct system sales and cloud access, continuously upgrading them as the hardware matures, with particular focus on applications requiring high data privacy, such as financial portfolio optimization, for the Swiss national strategy.