Oxford Quantum Circuits
Oxford University spinout building fault-tolerant quantum computing systems, operating commercially in the UK, US, Japan and Spain.
Oxford Quantum Circuits raised £260m ($350m) in a Series C round on 2 June 2026, Europe's largest private quantum funding round, led by Bullhound Capital with the British Business Bank and Oxford colleges among the co-investors.
Last refreshed: 31 July 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Why did OQC just raise the biggest private quantum round in European history?
Timeline for Oxford Quantum Circuits
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UK Startups and Innovationraised £260m Series C, Europe's largest-ever private quantum round
UK Startups and Innovation: OQC raises £260m in Europe's biggest quantum roundBackground
Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) is a superconducting quantum-computing hardware company founded in 2017 as a University of Oxford spinout by physicist Dr Peter Leek. It 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, differentiating it from US incumbents such as IBM and Google.
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, supplying cloud-accessible Quantum computing capacity to enterprise and research customers. It occupies a strategically significant position in the UK Government's ambition to become a Tier 1 quantum nation by 2033, and its Series c positions it as the largest independently funded European quantum hardware company.
OQC raised Europe's biggest quantum round
Oxford Quantum Circuits closed a £260m ($350m) Series c on 2 June 2026, the largest private quantum funding round in European history, led by Bullhound Capital and joined by the British Business Bank, Rokos Capital Management, COFIDES, Chevron Technology Ventures, SBI, UTEC, Magdalen College Oxford and Oxford Science Enterprises . The state bank's presence signals deliberate public co-investment in a sector the UK wants to lead by 2033.
The round landed weeks before UKRI confirmed a 58% cut to the Science and Technology Facilities Council's national-laboratory funding over four years, mothballing the Clara electron-beam facility, a reminder that private capital and public Science funding are moving in opposite directions across the same UK physics ecosystem .
