Who pays for quantum computers

What counts

The companies: builders of quantum computers or their qubit chips that have disclosed $20 million or more of funding, and smaller builders with a machine in use at a customer's site, as on the deployment map. Builders with no disclosed funding are left out. Money raised from 2015 on counts.

Money that reached the company: equity rounds, convertibles, grants and signed government awards (the first tranche, or the signed amount where there are no tranches), and for listed companies the proceeds of their listing and of later share sales and warrant exercises. Loans are not counted. Letters of intent, award ceilings, conditional loans and offerings not yet closed are shown on each company but not counted. Contracts to deliver a machine are sales and are left out, and so are acquisitions, a payment to shareholders rather than capital raised.

How it is grouped

Modalities, as on the deployment map:

• Superconducting: circuits of superconducting metal cooled close to absolute zero.
• Trapped ion: charged atoms held by electromagnetic fields and controlled with lasers or microwaves.
• Neutral atom: uncharged atoms held in grids of laser beams.
• Photonic: qubits carried by particles of light.
• Silicon spin: the spin of single electrons or atoms in chips, mostly silicon; Quantum Brilliance's diamond chips are counted here too.
• Annealing: machines that settle on the lowest-energy answer to an optimisation problem rather than running gate-based algorithms, so their qubit counts do not compare with the others'.

The matrix groups companies by the money they have raised, not by their age: scale-ups have raised over $500 million, late stage $250 million to $500 million, growth $50 million to $250 million and early stage less.

Each investor takes the type of whoever controls its money: venture capital, corporate, institutional or government. Government money is marked as defence when a defence ministry or agency, or a state defence group, controls it; the other government types are sovereign funds, state investors, grants and public research bodies.

Listed companies

For listed companies the total has three parts: private rounds before listing, the listing itself (an initial public offering, or a merger with a listed acquisition company and a private placement) and later raises on public markets. "Private rounds only" removes the last two. Government awards received after listing count as private money.

Where a reported total of the money counted here is higher than the rounds itemised, the difference appears as its own line, with the source of that total. Totals that include loans are not used.

Sources and currency

Every round links to where it is confirmed. A three-step mark shows how directly: the company, a regulatory filing or a government; an investor or counsel on the deal; or the press alone, where nothing else exists. Releases often name only the lead investors, so each investor's round count is a floor. Amounts in other currencies are converted to US dollars at the European Central Bank's reference rates of 10 July 2026, with the original amount kept on each round. Amounts given only roughly ("nearly", "over") count at the stated figure.