Top100 Swiss Startup alumnus ZuriQ has secured a USD 25.5 million seed round to accelerate the development of its trapped-ion quantum processors. The funding, led by QUANTONATION, will support team growth, expand research, and scale manufacturing of the company’s novel two-dimensional chip architecture.
Founded in 2024 as a spin-off from ETH Zurich by Professor Jonathan Home’s research group, Zurich-based ZuriQ, ranked among the Top100 Swiss Startups, is tackling one of quantum computing’s biggest challenges: scaling trapped-ion processors. While trapped ions are among the highest-performing qubits thanks to their long coherence times and strong connectivity, conventional one-dimensional architectures become increasingly difficult to scale.
ZuriQ has developed a native two-dimensional architecture based on Penning micro-traps, replacing the oscillating electric fields used in traditional designs with a static magnetic field. This allows ions to move freely across the chip without the junctions that typically create bottlenecks as systems grow.
The company has already demonstrated a 3×3 array of nine individually controlled ions the largest two-dimensional trapped-ion array of its kind to date. Developed in collaboration with ETH Zurich and fabricated by manufacturing partner Infineon, the chip also validates that the technology can be produced using established semiconductor manufacturing processes.
