Oxford Ionics Raised 30-Million Pounds to Advance Quantum Computing

The multi-record-breaking startup Oxford Ionics has raised 30 million pounds in Series A funding from some of the world’s leading quantum and technology investors to address critical scalability issues affecting quantum computing’s future. Braavos Investment Advisers and Oxford Science Enterprises were in charge of the round.

With the help of this most recent funding round, Oxford Ionics will be able to hire individuals for positions across the organization’s functions, including software developers and engineers, designers, scientists, and a growing back-office team.

Oxford Ionics, which was founded in 2019 by Dr. Chris Ballance and Dr. Tom Harty, takes a novel approach to designing and scaling trapped-ions, one of the most promising quantum computing technologies. Trapped ions have long proven to be superior in our race for a quantum future, in which multiple technologies vie for dominance. Trapped ions have been the driving force behind all of the most successful quantum systems to date, and it has been demonstrated that Oxford Ionics consistently outperform the others.

Dr. Chris Ballance said that the two most important metrics for any quantum computer are the error rate and qubit connectivity. Dr. Chris Ballance added that it is impossible to determine whether a quantum computer with one million qubits is superior to one with one hundred. A quantum processor chip the size of a postage stamp with a few hundred perfect qubits can solve problems that no one else supercomputer can, but if the qubits aren’t good enough, the same problem can take a warehouse-sized machine.

According to Dr. Tom Harty, everything we do at OI is about building better, not just bigger quantum computers. Over the next two years, their plan focuses on making quantum processors with thousands of useful qubits less risky. This involves, among other things, demonstrating their ability to raise the error rates they have already recorded and demonstrating their integration into a silicon chip while managing issues like qubit-qubit cross-talk.