Neutral-Atom Quantum Computer Maker Oratomic Raises $475M Series B

Money is pouring into quantum computing. In the same week, U.S. startup Oratomic closed a large round and UK trapped-ion startup Universal Quantum raised more than $100 million — the largest Series A ever for a UK-headquartered quantum computing company. No one has built a commercially useful quantum computer yet, but investors are racing to back whoever gets to “fault-tolerant” first.

Oratomic builds quantum computers using neutral atoms, trapping individual atoms with lasers like “optical tweezers” and freely rearranging them mid-computation. Because atoms can be moved around, a single atom can form error-correction relationships with many more neighbors than fixed architectures allow — which the company says means far fewer qubits are needed for error correction. On that basis, Oratomic argues a utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer is achievable with roughly 10,000 to 20,000 reconfigurable neutral-atom qubits, rather than the millions some rival approaches require.

The company came out of stealth this past March. Its founding team is made up of researchers who originally believed commercially useful quantum computing was still far off, drawn mainly from Caltech physics along with researchers from Berkeley, Harvard, Amazon and Google. CEO Dolev Bluvstein comes from Harvard’s Lukin group. Co-founder and Caltech professor Manuel Endres has already trapped arrays of roughly 6,000 atoms in the lab, providing experimental backing for the company’s claims, and theoretical physicist John Preskill — who coined the term “quantum supremacy” — serves as an advisor.