Oratomic raises $300M to build a simpler quantum computer

Oratomic, a quantum computing startup founded by Caltech physicists, said this week that it has raised $300 million in a Series A funding round. The round was co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital, and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Bezos Expeditions, Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Lowercarbon Capital, and Bain Capital. Oratomic entered the race to build a utility-scale quantum computer earlier this year, with a goal of delivering one by the end of the decade.

The company uses optical tweezers — lasers that hold individual atoms in place — as the physical basis for its machine. Its founders say they discovered an error-correction method that works with significantly fewer qubits, the basic unit of quantum information, than previously thought possible, and that discovery is what prompted them to start the company. As a result, Oratomic has no plans to develop or sell noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) systems — devices with tens to hundreds of qubits that aren’t fault-tolerant, which many rivals already offer to research scientists and corporations. “The difference is that we need roughly 10,000 to 20,000 qubits to build a useful computer, and we have already experimentally demonstrated all of the core components required of that computer at a slightly smaller scale,” Oratomic co-founder and CEO Dolev Bluvstein told TechCrunch.

Bluvstein said Oratomic shouldn’t be compared to PsiQuantum, a startup valued at $7 billion last September. PsiQuantum is also bypassing the NISQ stage but is targeting a million-qubit machine by the end of next year — an order of magnitude larger than the scale Oratomic says it needs. The funding arrives amid broader investor enthusiasm for quantum computing: Infleqtion and Quantinuum both went public this year, while public companies Rigetti and IonQ have seen their share prices surge over the past 18 months. Investor Vinod Khosla has said he is confident Oratomic will build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer — one able to reliably correct errors as they occur.

Why it matters

Oratomic’s funding and its error-correction approach could sharply lower the number of qubits — and by extension the physical scale and cost — needed to build a commercially viable quantum computer, positioning it against rivals like PsiQuantum that are betting on million-qubit systems.