Oxford Quantum Circuits

Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) is a superconducting quantum-computing hardware company that raised £260m ($350m) in a Series c round on 2 June 2026, the largest private quantum funding round in European history. The round was led by Bullhound Capital and included the British Business Bank, Rokos Capital Management, COFIDES, Chevron Technology Ventures, SBI, UTEC, Magdalen College Oxford and Oxford Science Enterprises.

OQC was founded by physicist Dr Peter Leek as a spinout from the University of Oxford, and commercialises the "coaxmon" qubit architecture, a patented superconducting design that places the qubit inside a coaxial structure to reduce electromagnetic interference and improve coherence times. The company operates Quantum Systems across four countries: the UK, US, Japan and Spain, making it one of the few European quantum hardware firms with live international deployments. It supplies cloud-accessible Quantum computing capacity to enterprise and research customers.

OQC occupies a strategically significant position in the UK Government's ambition to become a Tier 1 quantum nation by 2033. The Series c positions it as the largest independently funded European quantum hardware company, with the British Business Bank's participation signalling deliberate public co-investment in the sector. Its coaxmon architecture differentiates it from US incumbents (IBM, Google) and represents one of a small number of non-US quantum hardware lineages with genuine commercial traction. The round arrived weeks before UKRI confirmed a 58% cut to STFC's national-laboratory funding over four years and the mothballing of the Clara electron-beam facility, a reminder that private capital and public Science funding are moving in opposite directions across the same UK quantum and physics ecosystem.