Quantum News Nexus

Q-Factor, a neutral atom quantum computing company based in Tel Aviv, has emerged from stealth mode to announce a $24 million seed funding round with Intel Capital as one of the participants.

The round was led by NFX and TPY Capital, with participation from Intel Capital, Korea Investment Partners, Deep33, and the Matias family, along with a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority. The company’s founders spun it out from research they conducted at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and Weizmann Institute of Science. Technion and Weizmann–the latter through Yeda, its technology transfer arm–also are shareholders n Q-Factor.

Intel has not been very vocal at times about its quantum efforts. The company has discussed its work on silicon spin qubits in the past, but when you consider how the major traditional semiconductor giants are involved in quantum, Nvidia has been much more a galvanizing force in the ecosystem, and AMD at least has a partnership with top quantum player IBM.

However, Intel Capital, which is still part of Intel after a spin-off plan was shelved last year, has been a bit more active in the quantum ecosystem, investing in firms such as Quantum Machines and QuTech. Intel also has been identified as a technology collaborator with both of those companies.

There are several neutral-atom quantum computing companies already advancing on their own roadmaps, but Q-Factor claimed in a statement that its edge is that its founders  “closely analyzed the limitations of current neutral atom quantum computing, and have identified the architectural bottlenecks that prevent current platforms from scaling beyond a few thousand qubits. Q-Factor has developed an approach to overcome them and scale to over one million.”

“The quantum computing industry needs a revolution, not an evolution,” said Prof. Ofer Firstenberg, co-founder and chief scientist of Q-Factor. “Current systems are too small to deliver on the promise of quantum computing, and incremental improvements alone aren’t going to close that gap. We’ve developed an architecture designed for continuous scalability, a Moore’s Law-like trajectory that can take neutral atom systems from thousands of qubits to millions and beyond.”

Q-Factor was founded by Prof. Nir Davidson, a world-renowned authority in ultracold atoms with 280 published papers and former dean of physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science; Prof. Ofer Firstenberg of the Weizmann Institute, an expert in quantum optics and Rydberg atoms, formerly of Harvard and MIT; Prof. Yoav Sagi of the Technion, a leading authority in neutral-atom manipulation, formerly of JILA and the University of Colorado; and Dr. Guy Raz, a physicist with 20 years of technical leadership for multiple deep tech startups.

Lisa Cohen, Investment Director at Intel Capital, added, “Q-Factor’s founding team combines world-class scientific depth with a clear-eyed understanding of what it will take to build a commercially viable quantum computer. They’ve watched the field evolve, learned from the challenges others have encountered, and assembled the right expertise to tackle the hardest remaining problem in quantum computing: scale.”

Quantum News Nexus is a site from freelance writer and editor Dan O’Shea that covers quantum computing, quantum sensing, quantum networking, quantum-safe security, and more. You can find him on X @QuantumNewsGuy and doshea14@gmail.com.