My latest at Forbes …
Four months after closing a $100 million Series A, Israeli quantum computing startup Quantum Art has gone back to investors for more. The company just added $40 million to that round, bringing its total lifetime funding to around $164 million. The same lead investor, Bedford Ridge Capital, came back for the extension, joined by a handful of new names including Hudson Bay Capital and Wolverine Global Ventures.
The timing lines up with a significant shift in direction. Quantum Art is moving from pure R&D into its first commercial product: a Quantum-as-a-Service offering that will let customers access its systems via the cloud. That’s a familiar playbook in the quantum world, but a real milestone for a startup that has mostly been heads-down on engineering.
What makes the company interesting is the architecture. Rather than running quantum operations one or two qubits at a time, Quantum Art uses spectrally engineered laser pulses to operate on many qubits simultaneously. CEO Tal David calls it playing chords instead of notes. The company also uses optical segmentation to partition a single long ion chain into 20-plus independently operating cores, with a roadmap to a million physical qubits in a 50x50mm footprint.
The near-term target is Perspective, a 1,000-qubit machine due in 2027. If the company hits its claimed error-correction efficiency, that would put it in striking range of real quantum advantage on practical workloads.