QuantrolOx, the Oxford spin-out that automates the control of quantum computers, raised €12 million (about $13.3 million) in a Series A2 round led by IW Capital, the company said Oct. 26, 2026. The European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund co-invested.
The timing reflects a practical problem. Quantum hardware is leaving research labs for on-premises installations at universities and regional hubs, and the slow, expert-driven work of tuning qubits, the basic units of quantum information, has become a bottleneck for those machines.
"Every industry is built on its tools and its people," said Vishal Chatrath, co-founder and chief executive. "QuantrolOx is building the foundations of the quantum industry: our tools industrialise quantum hardware and train the people to run it."
Where the money goes
The company said it will use the funds to scale commercial deployments of its Quantum EDGE software, expand its Quantum EDGE Academy training platform, and grow its U.S. team, including a new office in Berkeley, California. Earlier backers include Voima Ventures, Serendipity Capital, Hoxton Ventures and Transpose Capital. The company did not disclose a valuation.
Reports on the size of the round differ. The Sesamers site noted that UK coverage put it at £10 million, while CB Insights lists a Series A of $13.43 million. The company's own press release calls it Series A2.
Charlie Lyon Carroll, investment director at IW Capital, said in the same release that QuantrolOx "has automated the slowest, most expert-dependent part of running a quantum computer, on any hardware."
What the software does
Quantum EDGE is a hardware-agnostic platform for characterizing, calibrating, tuning and operating qubits and quantum processors, according to the company. In one installation at the UK National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC), QuantrolOx said, the software produced a two-qubit gate in under 25 minutes, a task that can take up to a week by hand. That figure is the company's own claim and was not independently verified.
Chatrath was blunter about the pitch at the Sept. 9, 2026 opening of the company's Berkeley presence, according to a UC Berkeley Physics news item. "No physicists want to waste time tuning qubits, they want to use them," he said.
The Quantum EDGE Academy, launched Aug. 26, 2026, trains workers on simulated hardware and workflows. QuantrolOx also sells VIDYAQAR, an open-architecture superconducting quantum system for education, research, testing and benchmarking. Quantum Computing Report said a VIDYAQAR system was deployed at MAHE in Bengaluru under India's National Quantum Mission, with an inauguration noted Oct. 22, 2026.
A company with several footholds
Founded in 2021 as a University of Oxford spin-out, QuantrolOx is headquartered in Espoo, Finland, and has offices in the UK, the Netherlands, the U.S. and India. Its co-founders include Prof. Andrew Briggs, who is chair; Chatrath; Assoc. Prof. Natalia Ares, chief scientist; and Dominic Lennon, director of product.
Headcount is hard to pin down. Sesamers put it at 39, while LinkedIn lists 11 to 50 employees, and both figures may lag.
In the U.S., the company signed a memorandum of understanding with UC Berkeley's Department of Physics and the Roger Herst Quantum Nexus, effective July 7. The five-year framework aims to advance the industrialization of superconducting quantum computing through machine-learning-driven measurement and automation.
Elsewhere, Quantum EDGE powers a University of Saskatchewan system announced March 31, 2026. Rigetti's disclosure describes an on-premises machine built around a Rigetti Novera QPU (quantum processing unit), a Zero Point Cryogenics fridge, Qblox control electronics and QuantrolOx software. The company also announced a partnership with AQSolotl on June 24, and it appears in TreQ's Compass SG25B open-architecture station alongside Qblox, Rigetti and Bluefors.
A crowded control layer
QuantrolOx is not alone. Quantum Machines of Israel raised a $170 million Series C on Feb. 25, 2025, and Q-CTRL, Qedma, Riverlane, Qruise, Zurich Instruments and Keysight Quantum Solutions all sell control, error-management or calibration tools.
Some of those rivals have published results of their own. Qruise reported on April 22, 2026 that its software cut bring-up time to about 15 minutes at the Israeli Quantum Computing Center on a Quantum Machines OPX1000. A preprint on IBM's 156-qubit Heron r3 processor found that Q-CTRL and Qedma reduced mean absolute error versus raw execution by about 3.1x and 4.7x, respectively.
Larger sums are moving elsewhere in the sector. Oxford Quantum Circuits raised a £260 million Series C on June 3, which it called Europe's largest private quantum round, and Quobly raised €115 million the same day.
Analysts expect spending to climb. Gartner said on Oct. 8, 2026 that global quantum computing revenue will reach $869.9 million in 2026 and pass $1 billion in 2027, while IDC forecasts worldwide quantum spending of $17.3 billion by 2029.
Adoption, though, remains early. The Quantum Insider's State of Quantum 2026 study found that 89% of surveyed enterprises were hands-on with the technology, but only 3% had reached scaled deployment.
What comes next
For QuantrolOx, the near-term agenda is set: commercial deployments, the academy and the Berkeley office. Whether automation becomes the standard way to run quantum machines, or one more feature in a crowded field of control tools, is still an open matter.
"With IW Capital and the EIC Fund behind us, we are setting the standards and accelerating the path to practical quantum computing," Chatrath said.
