Oratomic, a California quantum computing startup founded in 2025, has raised $475 million in a Series B round that values it at $5.5 billion, SiliconANGLE reported Thursday. The outlet also reported that U.K.-based Universal Quantum has raised more than $100 million in a Series A, a second large check for a quantum hardware maker in the same day.

What Happened

Oratomic's round was co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures, General Catalyst and Bezos Expeditions. It brings the company's total funding to $775 million and comes three months after a $300 million Series A. The valuation rose from $1.5 billion at that earlier round.

The company builds qubits from reconfigurable arrays of neutral atoms. Its stated goal is a fault-tolerant machine with about 10,000 qubits, compared with the roughly 1 million qubits often described as necessary for meaningful commercial fault tolerance. Co-founder and CEO Dolev Bluvstein said the industry needs to reach the point where it can build a working computer that is "cheap and manufacturable," according to SiliconANGLE.

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Universal Quantum's Series A was co-led by DCVC and Firgun Ventures, with EDBI, Artal, Integral GlobalTech, Main Sequence and Hostplus among the other investors. SiliconANGLE described it as the largest Series A raised by a U.K.-headquartered quantum computing company. The firm builds modular trapped-ion systems, which use charged atoms as qubits, aimed at error-corrected computing. CEO Sebastian Weidt said investors see the company as one of the most credible paths to quantum computing at scale.

Universal Quantum plans to open its first research and development center outside Europe in Singapore while continuing to grow in the U.S., Japan and at its hub in Hamburg, Germany.

Why It Matters

The size of Oratomic's round is unusual for a company barely a year old, and the jump in valuation within a single quarter shows how aggressively investors are pricing quantum hardware bets. Its pitch rests on needing far fewer physical qubits than other roadmaps assume. Error correction typically spreads one reliable logical qubit across many physical ones, so cutting the total required by roughly two orders of magnitude would shrink the size, cost and engineering difficulty of a useful machine.

Both companies use atoms as qubits rather than the superconducting circuits favored by IBM and Google. Neutral-atom designs hold atoms in place with lasers and can rearrange them, while trapped-ion systems use electric fields to confine charged atoms. Each approach claims advantages in qubit quality and connectivity, and none has yet produced a commercially useful fault-tolerant computer.

Market Context

SiliconANGLE cited McKinsey research estimating that quantum computing generated more than $1 billion in revenue worldwide in 2025, could exceed $4.4 billion by 2028 and could create up to $2.7 trillion in economic value by 2035. Those projections depend on fault-tolerant machines arriving on schedule, which is what both companies are now funded to attempt.

What to Watch

For Oratomic, the test is hardware: showing that its lower qubit count can deliver error-corrected operations at scale, and that the machines can be built cheaply as its CEO suggests. For Universal Quantum, the next markers are the Singapore research center and how its modular trapped-ion design progresses as it expands in the U.S. and Japan.