UK Quantum Firm OQC Lands Record $350 Million Round

Oxford Quantum Circuits has closed a £260 million (close to $350 million) Series C round, the largest private funding deal for a European quantum computing company. The company announced the raise on June 3, in which Bullhound Capital was leading and the British Business Bank joined alongside existing backers. OQC says the money will pay for international expansion and faster work on fault-tolerant quantum systems.

Who’s Backing the Deal

Indeed, the round came in oversubscribed, worth about $350 million in US dollars. Specifically, it was Bullhound Capital that led it, and Per Roman, the firm’s founding partner, is joining OQC’s board. The British Business Bank put in money, along with Fynveur, COFIDES, Rokos Capital Management’s RCM Private Markets Fund, Alpha Edison, Fulcrum Asset Management, Pentland Ventures, Magdalen College Oxford, and several others. Existing investors stayed in too, including Oxford Science Enterprises, SBI, Chevron Technology Ventures, and OTIF Ventures. J.P. Morgan acted as exclusive placement agent.

OQC builds and runs superconducting quantum computers made for data-centre settings. Its customers come from enterprise and government. The company already has systems running in the UK, the US, Japan, and Spain, with a platform spanning Europe, North America, and Asia.

Where the Money Goes

Meanwhile, OQC plans to widen its presence in priority markets and push its roadmap toward commercially useful, fault-tolerant machines. Demand is coming from financial services, defense, and security customers who want secure quantum infrastructure for problems classical computers can’t handle in practice.

CEO Gerald Mullally called the raise “a coming-of-age moment for British quantum computing.” He said it gives OQC the capital to scale abroad and meet rising customer demand. Founder and Chief Scientific Officer Dr Peter Leek said the investment supports the next stage of work on system performance and reliability.

“OQC was founded to use innovative quantum circuit designs to build engineered systems that scale as simply as possible. I’m proud to be part of the incredible team we have today doing exactly that, to pioneer the future of quantum computing. This investment supports the next stage of our work: advancing system performance and reliability while continuing to integrate quantum computers into the trusted infrastructure customers depend on.”

The UK government welcomed the news. Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves described the round as “a major vote of confidence in the UK’s quantum sector.” She pointed to a recent government commitment of up to £2 billion to help UK quantum companies reach commercial scale.

George Mills of the British Business Bank said quantum computing has been held back by problems with scaling, and that OQC’s systems address that gap as the company develops its OQC TITAN platform. Leandros Kalisperas, the bank’s chief investment officer, said the challenge for UK deeptech isn’t invention but scale.

“For deeptech in the UK, the challenge is not invention, it’s scale. In order to build global companies rooted in the UK, our financial firepower must match our scientific excellence. The Bank sees this as nothing short of a national economic imperative, so we are acting at pace to deliver significantly higher levels of funding for UK scale ups.”

OQC was founded in the UK and grew out of research at Oxford. The raise places it among the best-capitalized private quantum companies anywhere, according to the company. Its progress lines up with the UK government’s stated goal of leading in quantum technologies.