Universal Quantum raises $100M Series A for utility-scale quantum

Universal Quantum, the University of Sussex spinout engineering modular trapped-ion quantum computers, has raised a $100M Series A co-led by DCVC and Firgun Ventures – the largest Series A ever raised by a UK-headquartered quantum company.

The round, announced on 8 October, lands in Haywards Heath – a Sussex commuter town better known for its railway junction than for its physics. The money funds expansion in the United States, Japan and the company’s German hub in Hamburg, and pushes its modular architecture towards error-corrected, utility-scale machines.

Thirteen funds and the Roblox founder

DCVC, the Silicon Valley deep-tech firm, and quantum-specialist investor Firgun Ventures co-led. The participant list reads like a map of the world’s capital pools: Singapore’s sovereign investor EDBI, Invus, Japanese asset manager Integral GlobalTech, Main Sequence, Australian pension funds Hostplus and NGS Super, IAG Capital, EdenBase, Full Disclosure, Eigenstate Holdings, SiteGround Capital, Nauta Capital and The Venture Collective. Roblox founder and CEO Dave Baszucki invested personally.

“This round unites an extraordinary group of investors from the world’s most important pools of capital around a single mission,” said co-founder and CEO Sebastian Weidt in the announcement – the mission being quantum computers useful enough to pay for themselves.

The round takes Universal Quantum‘s total funding past $125M (tech.eu, October 2026). The company also won a €67M contract from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in 2023 – still the largest ever granted to a UK-based quantum startup, and the reason Hamburg is a hub rather than a sales office.

From a 2017 blueprint to a Hamburg hub

Winfried Hensinger and Sebastian Weidt founded the company in 2018 out of the Sussex Centre for Quantum Technologies, building on the blueprint for a large-scale trapped-ion quantum computer they co-authored in 2017. The bet is modularity: rather than one ever-larger monolith, Universal Quantum links many quantum chips into a single machine – a quantum computer built more like a data centre than a lab experiment, and the specific technology The Telegraph reported it was raising to fund.

The team is just over 100 people (company LinkedIn, October 2026) across sites on three continents, with the headquarters deliberately kept in Sussex. The University of Sussex talks openly of a “Quantum Silicon Valley” in the Brighton region on the back of this round – a phrase we would normally file under ecosystem folklore, except this one comes with $100M attached.

A $1bn industry heading for $4.4bn

Quantum computing finally has revenue worth measuring. Quantum computing companies passed $1bn in worldwide revenue in 2025 and could reach $4.4bn by 2028 – an implied growth rate above 60% a year – with the market projected at $43-71bn by 2035 (McKinsey Quantum Technology Monitor, April 2026). Investment into quantum startups hit $12.6bn in 2025, 6.3 times the 2024 level, per the same report.

For scale against our own records: Alice & Bob raised €100M in January 2025 and Multiverse Computing €189M later that year – both at Series B. A British Series A now matches what French and Spanish quantum champions raised a full stage later. Our fundraising data has tracked nine European quantum rounds; this is the largest at this stage.

The Series A that refused New York

In May, The Telegraph reported that US-backed SPACs were courting Universal Quantum for a New York listing, and that management was resisting because it wanted the business independent and headquartered in the UK. Five months later, the company has closed the $100M it was reportedly seeking – with Silicon Valley money inside the round rather than above it.

So what does a Series A mean when it is bigger than most European Series Bs? Two things worth watching. First, patient capital is arriving earlier: sovereign funds and pension money at Series A was unheard of in European deep tech, and here are EDBI, Hostplus and NGS Super on the cap table of a pre-revenue-scale hardware company. Second, the stage labels are drifting – this round is a growth cheque wearing a Series A badge, the same pattern we see in Europe’s hardware cohort more broadly.

The good news is the direction of travel: a UK quantum company courted by New York chose to raise global money and keep its HQ in Sussex. Europe’s deep tech can fund itself at scale without shipping its headquarters across the Atlantic. Watch who follows.