Led by the World Fund the funds will be used to expand its international business and accelerate product development.
The funding which follows a €39m ($39m) Series A1 announcement in 2020 and includes part of a €35m venture loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB) announced earlier this year, makes it the largest ever funding round raised by a European quantum computing company.
The round included participation from Bayern Kapital, EIC Fund, OurCrowd, QCI SPV, Tofino and Varma, as well as existing investors Maki.vc, Matadero QED, MIG Fonds, OpenOcean, Salvia GmbH, Santo Venture Capital GmbH, Tencent, Tesi, and Vsquared.
Since its launch in 2018, IQM has become one of the fastest-growing quantum computer companies in Europe and is also the only European company that is already delivering full-stack quantum systems.
As an enabling technology that can deliver supercharged, precise computer power that is immensely more advanced than any supercomputer, it is expected to improve drug discovery, transform encryption and data protection, and predict financial systems.
IQM’s on-premise quantum computers are used by research laboratories and supercomputing centres to address challenging problems in healthcare, finance, logistics and chemistry. The company’s co-design strategy also enables industrial customers to work closely with IQM to achieve quantum advantage based on application-specific processors.
Quantum computing is also seen as being integral to finding resolutions to climate issues due to the technology’s ability to model solutions that would previously be impossible to achieve through current levels of computing power, with McKinsey forecasting that climate technologies developed using quantum computing could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by seven gigatons a year by 2035. This could include helping to decarbonise power and fuel, re-shaping industrial operations and reforming food and forestry.
With this new investment, IQM said that it would be dedicating resources to co-designing quantum computer processors to provide solutions to tackle the climate crisis and promote sustainable development to improve lives around the world.
Already, the company is exploring novel approaches to develop better battery solutions with a leading car manufacturer, as well as ground-breaking methods for new material design and quantum algorithms that can be used to tackle climate problems.
World Fund only invests in technologies with a Climate Performance Potential (CPP) of removing 100 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere annually by 2040. The fund’s CPP calculations show that the battery performance and adoption use cases alone would enable IQM’s technology to exceed this threshold.
Dr. Sierk Poetting, Chairman of IQM Quantum Computers, said: “This financing round is a significant milestone that recognizes our recent technological milestones and contributes to the acceleration of IQM’s development efforts. We value the continued participation of our existing investors and welcome new investors to this powerful syndicate.”
