German quantum computing company Quint has raised €9.1 million in its first funding round, a little more than a year after it was founded, Handelsblatt reported. The round was led by Vsquared Ventures, with Quantonation, Nucleus Capital and industry investors including IQM co-founder Mikko Möttönen taking part. According to the newspaper, it is the largest round raised by a German quantum company at such an early stage, and the company has also received an EU grant of more than €2 million.
Quint is targeting one of the field's central problems: errors. Correcting them requires spreading information across many physical qubits, which makes machines expensive. The company has developed a patented architecture for superconducting chips in which the physical structure of the components is designed together with the electrical signals that control them, to suppress a large share of errors on the chip itself.
The company is a spinoff of Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Investors say the approach could shorten and cheapen the path to fault-tolerant quantum computers, but the company has not yet published measured results.