S-Transistors Raises €2.6 Million Pre-Seed Round to Introduce Superconducting Transistor Platform

Insider Brief

• Finnish startup S-Transistors raised €2.6 million to develop superconducting transistor circuits designed to help quantum computers scale more efficiently.
• The VTT spinout plans to build product prototypes, establish a cryogenic laboratory and manufacturing pilot line, and expand its team.
• Its first product will be a multiplexer intended to reduce the wiring and power demands of controlling quantum devices inside cryogenic systems.

PRESS RELEASE — Newly launched Finnish startup S-Transistors, originating from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, has raised €2.6 million in pre-seed funding to pioneer a fundamentally new class of integrated circuits based on superconducting transistors. The technology has several promising applications, from energy-efficient classical computing to spacecraft electronics, but quantum computing, in particular, stands to benefit most.

Today’s cryogenically cooled superconducting quantum computers need a paradigm-changing solution to break the scaling limit of the quantum processing unit (QPU) — the array of quantum bits that, by analogy to a conventional CPU, does the quantum computing. That limit comes from the power-hungry, poorly scalable way quantum processors are controlled today: multiple expensive, bulky cables per qubit, running from the processor inside the cryostat out to room-temperature electronics. This is exactly where S-Transistors’ superconducting transistor technology, which is already available at wafer scale, offers a solution that is radically more energy-efficient and compact than existing alternatives.