Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) raised a £260m ($350m) Series C on Tuesday 2 June, the largest private quantum funding round Europe has recorded. Growth investor Bullhound Capital led. The British Business Bank (BBB), the UK's state development bank, joined the cap table as a co-investor, and chief executive Gerald Mullally called the raise a coming-of-age moment for British quantum.1
A Series C is a company's third major institutional round, the stage at which a firm scales a proven product rather than proving one. Alongside Oxford backers Magdalen College and Oxford Science Enterprises sit macro hedge fund Rokos Capital Management, Spain's state finance arm COFIDES, Chevron Technology Ventures, and Japan's SBI and UTEC. Rokos and Chevron do not write deep-tech research cheques; their presence reads as commercial capital betting on near-term returns.
Britain put £2bn behind quantum in March 2026 through the ProQure procurement programme, the first country to commit at that scale. The BBB had already cornerstoned Quantum Motion's $160m Series C in May, taking the anchor position other investors follow. OQC is the first British quantum company to raise this size from a predominantly commercial group, with the state present yet not carrying the round.
Fault-tolerant systems, machines that correct their own errors well enough to run long computations, need fabrication capacity, and OQC already operates across the UK, United States, Japan and Spain. DSIT has not said whether the £260m funds British plant and jobs or expansion across those overseas sites, the question that decides what the £2bn quantum commitment actually buys at home.
