Seeqc, a US-based quantum computing company, has raised $22.4m in its series A round with $5m coming from M Ventures, the strategic corporate venture capital unit of Germany-based healthcare company Merck. The M Ventures funding was first announced in April.
EQT Ventures, an investment vehicle run by Sweden’s Wallenberg family lead the round, which also included FAM AB, a privately-owned holding company owned by the three largest Wallenberg Foundations, which have ownership interests in some of the leading companies in the Nordic region such as ABB, AstraZeneca, Atlas Copco, Electrolux, Ericsson, EQT, Nasdaq, Saab AB, SAS, SEB, SKF and Stora Enso.
Additional investors in the A round include BlueYard Capital, New Lab Ventures and the Partnership Fund for New York (PFNY).
This investment brings Seeqc’s total venture funding to more than $29m. The A round follows a $6.8m seed round by BlueYard Capital, Cambium, NewLab and the Partnership Fund for New York City.
In 2019 Seeqc spun off from Hypres, a developer of superconductor electronics. Prior to this spinoff, Hypres had raised more than $100m from public and private investments to develop a multi-layer commercial superconductor chip foundry and intellectual property, almost all of which now belongs to Seeqc, the company said. Since then, Seeqc has added to its patents, tripled overall production capacity, and is in the process of constructing a new 5,000-square-foot millikelvin testing facility in New York. Seeqc has superconductive test facilities at the University of Naples, and in 2021 will build a product development and test centre in London.
Seeqc is developing digital quantum computing, which combines classical and quantum computing. This new architecture includes proprietary digital chips that are co-located with qubit chips as multi-chip modules in the same cryogenically cooled system.
John Levy, co-founder and co-CEO of Seeqc, said: “Seeqc is focusing its approach on industries like chemical engineering, machine learning/AI, manufacturing, and pharmaceutical development.
“The EQT Ventures team’s expertise in these industries, along with its collaborative approach to working with its portfolio companies, will be an invaluable resource in helping Seeqc grow and work towards quantum-powered breakthroughs in the coming years.”
The investment in Seeqc was led by EQT Ventures’ newly-formed frontier technology team, headed up by Ted Persson who said: “The groundwork to unleash the true potential of quantum computing by lowering the complexity of commercialization is happening right now and John, Oleg, Matt and the rest of the Seeqc team are leading the charge.”
