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The ETH Zürich spin-out is building trapped-ion processors on a novel two-dimensional architecture. The new funding will grow the team and expand its research efforts as the company works to increase the number of qubits it can put on a single chip.
Zürich, Switzerland, 28 July 2026; ZuriQ, a Swiss quantum computing company spun out of ETH Zürich, today announced it has raised $25.5 million in seed funding to scale its trapped-ion quantum processors. The round 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 new capital to expand its team alongside research and development efforts as it works to significantly increase the number of qubits its architecture can support.
Most trapped-ion quantum computers are built on an architecture first proposed more than two decades ago, in which ions are held in essentially one-dimensional chains stitched together into larger grids using complex junction structures. ZuriQ has taken a fundamentally different route with processors that are natively two-dimensional. Using Penning micro-traps, the company uses a static magnetic field in place of the rapidly oscillating fields most legacy architectures rely on, replaces the oscillating fields of conventional designs with a static magnetic field, allowing ions to move freely in any direction without the junctions that constrain reconfiguration.
“What makes this approach powerful is geometry,” said Professor Jonathan Home of ETH Zürich, and a scientific adviser to ZuriQ. “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.”
ZuriQ is proving out its native two-dimensional architecture with a working demonstrator – successfully developed in just 18 months. The demonstrator comprises a 3×3 array of nine individually controlled ions, the largest two-dimensional array of its kind demonstrated to date, built in collaboration with researchers at ETH Zürich. The chips behind it were fabricated with ZuriQ’s manufacturing partner, Infineon, showing the design can be produced with established industry processes.
With the architecture and its manufacturing route established, the company’s focus now turns to scale: rapidly increasing the number of ions on a chip to enable powerful, commercially useful machines. Since its last investment, ZuriQ has grown from four people to eighteen. The company has attracted world-class talent with backgrounds from leading quantum and photonics organizations, including IonQ, Xanadu, and Hamamatsu. The new capital will go toward further hiring, expanding the company’s research program, and scaling up chip fabrication – the groundwork for putting hundreds of qubits on a chip.
“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,” said Dr. Pavel Hrmo, co-founder and CEO of ZuriQ. “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.”
Christophe Jurczak, Founding Partner, Quantonation, said, “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.”
About ZuriQ
ZuriQ is a quantum computing company based in Zürich, Switzerland. Spun out of the ETH Zürich laboratory of Professor Jonathan Home by founders Dr Pavel Hrmo, Dr Tobias Sägesser and Dr Shreyans Jain, the company has developed a new approach for trapped-ion qubits that combines electric and magnetic fields to create natively two-dimensional arrays to break through the scaling limits of conventional systems. ZuriQ is rapidly solving the most challenging aspects of quantum computing processor design to develop architectures that support the thousands of qubits required for industrially useful quantum computing.
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Image source: ZuriQ
