QuantrolOx raises €12M Series A to automate quantum computer tuning
An Oxford spinout headquartered in Espoo has raised €12 million to automate qubit tuning, the slow step between a quantum chip arriving and a quantum chip computing. IW Capital led.
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Founded 2021 · Espoo, Finland
QuantrolOx, the Oxford University spinout headquartered in Espoo, has raised €12 million in a Series A led by IW Capital, with the European Innovation Council Fund and Transpose Capital, to automate the tuning of quantum computers and grow its business from a new office in Berkeley.
€12 million led by IW Capital, EIC Fund alongside
QuantrolOx announced the round on 22 October 2026. IW Capital led it, the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund co-invested and Transpose Capital took part (Tech.eu, 22 October 2026). UK coverage put the same round at £10 million (Startup Magazine, 23 October 2026), which is the same money counted in a different currency.
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Earlier backers Hoxton Ventures and Arm co-founder Hermann Hauser appear in coverage of the company, though neither is named as a participant in this round.
The money goes into commercial growth and into North America, following the opening of a Berkeley office. Charlie Lyon Carroll, Investment Director at IW Capital, explained what he was buying: “Oxford physics, Finnish engineering and a CEO with a great commercialisation track record is a rare combination.”
Four founders and the step nobody can skip
QuantrolOx was founded in 2021 and employs 39 people, with registered offices in Espoo, Oxford, Delft and Bengaluru. The founding team is Vishal Chatrath, the CEO and a former Nokia executive, Professor Andrew Briggs, emeritus professor of nanomaterials at Oxford, Dr Natalia Ares, an Oxford research fellow, and Dominic Lennon, who built the platform after his DPhil and now runs product.
The product is Quantum EDGE, a hardware-agnostic measurement and automation platform. It sits in the control layer and handles calibration, characterization and tuning, the slow manual work between a chip arriving and a chip computing. Published research behind the company showed its machine learning tuning quantum devices in under 70 minutes, faster than the best human benchmark (Tech.eu, 22 October 2026).
It is already running in other people’s labs. UC Berkeley and Academia Sinica in Taiwan use the software for research, hardware partners include QuantWare and AQSolotl, and Manipal Academy of Higher Education works with the company on Q-Hub, an open-architecture quantum system in India. “Every industry is built on its tools and its people,” Chatrath said of what the company sells.
A $780 million software market inside a $12.6 billion funding wave
Size the segment and the shape of this round makes sense. The quantum computing software market was worth $0.78 billion in 2026 and is forecast to reach $1.68 billion by 2030, a 21.2% compound annual growth rate (The Business Research Company, September 2026). That is a small market growing quickly, which is the right moment to own a layer of it.
The money around it is much bigger. Investment in quantum technology startups hit $12.6 billion in 2025, 6.3 times the 2024 level, and about 90% of it went to quantum computing companies, which together booked more than $1 billion of revenue in 2025 and could reach $4.4 billion by 2028 (McKinsey Quantum Technology Monitor, April 2026). Most of that capital buys hardware. Software takes a sliver.
In our own fundraising data, €12 million puts QuantrolOx between Coherence Quantum’s €2.78 million seed for cryogenic quantum control on 20 October 2026 and Universal Quantum’s $100 million Series A on 9 October 2026. Two of those three European rounds in October backed the control layer; one backed the qubits themselves.
Selling to everybody’s machine
So where does a European control-layer company actually win? Europe has been good at building quantum hardware and then losing the commercial layer on top of it. The reality is that a single hardware bet is a slow way to find out whether you backed the right physics, and Europe has made several of them at once, in Espoo, in Delft, in Oxford, in Grenoble.
The good news is that a control layer does not have to pick. Quantum EDGE is hardware-agnostic by design, so every architecture that wins is a customer and every architecture that loses costs the company nothing. That is why QuantrolOx can already be in a Berkeley lab, a Taipei lab and an Indian university at the same time, with a Finnish headquarters and an Oxford patent trail behind it.
What we are seeing is a European company whose customers are everyone else’s hardware bets. Imagine if the next five years of quantum go the way the EIC Fund’s Svetoslava Georgieva framed it, with the thing holding quantum back being how hard these machines are to operate, now that the physics mostly works. In that version, the control layer is where the recurring revenue lives.
Two things are worth watching from here. The first is where the next 39 hires go, because a Berkeley office and a Finnish headquarters pull in opposite directions and that tension has ended badly for European deeptech before. The second is whether the EIC Fund’s presence on this cap table brings the follow-on European growth capital that quantum Series B rounds will need in 2027.
Europe does not need to own every qubit. It needs to own the layer every qubit has to pass through. Watch the control stack!
