Swiss quantum computing start-up ZuriQ has secured US $ 25.5 million in seed funding to accelerate development of its native two-dimensional trapped-ion quantum processors, marking another milestone for the ETH Zürich spin-out.
The investment follows the company’ s US $ 4.2 million pre-seed round in 2025 and was led by Quantonation with participation from Forward. one, Extantia, Firgun Ventures and existing investors. The funding will support recruitment, research and development as ZuriQ works to dramatically increase the number of qubits supported on a single chip.
Unlike conventional trapped-ion quantum computers that rely on one-dimensional ion chains and complex junctions, ZuriQ’ s architecture uses Penning micro-traps and a static magnetic field, allowing ions to move freely without junction limitations. The company says this two-dimensional design provides greater scalability and more flexible connectivity between qubits.
Working alongside researchers at ETH Zürich, ZuriQ has already developed a demonstrator featuring a 3 × 3 array of nine individually controlled ions, described as the largest two-dimensional array of its kind. The chips were fabricated with manufacturing partner Infineon using established semiconductor production processes. The company’ s next objective is to scale the technology from experimental systems to commercially viable quantum processors capable of supporting hundreds of qubits.
CEO Dr Pavel Hrmo said the architecture was designed from the outset for two-dimensional scaling, enabling significantly greater qubit density than legacy approaches.
Since its previous funding round, ZuriQ has expanded from four to 18 employees, attracting specialists from organisations including IonQ, Xanadu and Hamamatsu as it prepares for commercial growth.
SWITZERLAND
AMD has signed a memorandum of understanding with the University of Oxford to support open academic frontier AI research at the new British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab( BOLD). The UK research lab brings together researchers affiliated with Oxford, University College London and Imperial College London. Under the agreement, AMD will explore providing up to £ 5 million in compute resources during the 18 months following BOLD’ s launch.
The collaboration will focus on compute access, software optimisation, research collaboration and open-source development. Researchers plan to investigate model training techniques beyond backpropagation, discovery using multiagent systems and adaptive physical AI. AMD will work with BOLD across the AI technology stack, exploring ways to optimise workloads through its open software ecosystem, including the permissively licensed ROCm software platform.
Support is expected to include infrastructure maintained by AMD, cloud service providers, public-sector partnerships and hardware contributions. The phased programme will initially support broad exploratory experiments before focusing on selected research directions and validating promising ideas.
AMD also plans to help researchers publish software, benchmarks and evaluation tools while contributing performance improvements to the wider open-source community.
Thomas Zacharia, Senior Vice President, Global Public Sector and Strategic Partnerships, AMD, said the collaboration would combine advanced computing, open software and technical expertise to help researchers pursue new AI frontiers. The initiative builds on AMD’ s existing advanced UK research relationships, including work with the University of Cambridge on the Zenith supercomputer and Sovereign AI Innovation Lab, and Imperial College London on AI and high-performance computing research.
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