ALETH / UK-FRONTIER / 2026-06-03 / OXFORD QUANTUM CIRCUITS $350M SERIES CAI analysis by Aleth · primary release
Summary
OQC has closed an oversubscribed £260 million ($350m) Series C, which it calls "Europe's largest ever private funding round for a quantum computing company". Bullhound Capital led, and its founding partner Per Roman joins the board. The British Business Bank, the government's development bank, has committed £100m, 38% of the round, according to its release. No price or valuation was given.
The money is to expand OQC's presence in "priority markets" and speed its roadmap to fault-tolerant quantum computing: machines that correct their own errors faster than they arise.
Chief executive Gerald Mullally: "This is a coming-of-age moment for British quantum computing... Globally, it represents a clear shift in the market – from long-term promise to near-term delivery in quantum computing."
The round
Round Announced Size announced Lead
Series A, first close Jul 2022 £38m Lansdowne, UTEC
Series B Nov 2023 $100m SBI Investment
Series C Jun 2026 £260m Bullhound CapitalThe Series A was co-led by Lansdowne Partners and UTEC (OQC's release). The Series B amount is from OQC's Japanese release, as tech.eu also reported.
In its English release on the Series B, which gave no amount, OQC said it had raised £41m before; with the Series B's $100m added, the Series C is still more than twice that. New investors include Fynveur (advised by Invus), COFIDES and Rokos Capital Management's RCM fund; Oxford Science Enterprises, SBI Investment and Chevron Technology Ventures are among those who came back. J.P. Morgan was placement agent.
OQC's revenue, cash and machines
Year to 30 June, £m FY2025 FY2024 (restated) Change
Revenue 0.34 4.66 -93%
Loss for the year (19.2) (14.3) £4.9m wider
Cash used in operations (17.7) (7.3) £10.4m more
Cash at 30 June 13.7 24.8 -£11.1m
Average employees 133 102 +30%From the FY2025 group accounts, which also restated FY2024 to write off all capitalised development.
The Series C is nearly fifteen times FY2025's cash used in operations. Almost all revenue comes from one customer at a time: 99.7% of FY2025's from "a major customer", for a system deployment in Europe, and 99.3% of FY2024's.
OQC's machines are superconducting: their circuits work only when chilled close to absolute zero. It runs Toshiko, a 32-qubit machine, in data centres in Tokyo and the UK and at Spain's CESGA supercomputing centre, and in September 2025 installed GENESIS, 16 qubits built to flag their own errors, in a Digital Realty data centre in New York. This year it has announced a joint research project with QinetiQ on defence networks and work with Mastercard to explore fraud detection, with no terms disclosed.
TITAN, due in 2028 on OQC's roadmap page, is to have 200 logical qubits; the roadmap of June 2025, as The Quantum Insider reprinted it, runs on to 50,000 by 2034. A logical qubit is a group of physical qubits that together correct their errors. OQC claims a ratio of physical to logical qubits "ten times lower for OQC's hardware than for today's state-of-the-art approaches". In February it published a package able to carry more than 500 qubits on one chip. IBM's Starling, announced in June 2025, aims at the same 200 logical qubits a year later, in 2029.
Where OQC stands among quantum companies
In dollars, OQC's $350m edges past the $320m that Finland's IQM, also a maker of superconducting machines, raised in September 2025, as tech.eu reported. IQM said the round valued it above $1bn. In the US, PsiQuantum raised $1bn at a $7bn valuation the same month, Reuters reported. Quantinuum upsized its Nasdaq listing to $1.43bn on 1 June and was due to price it on the evening of this announcement, according to IPO Scoop. And one Oxford quantum company has already gone to an American buyer: IonQ agreed in June 2025 to buy Oxford Ionics for $1.075bn.
Marin Ivezic of PostQuantum cites Sifted's count: the fourth European quantum round of $100m or more in 2026, against three in all of 2025, and adds: "$350 million is not IBM's resources, not Google's resources, and not the $10 billion valuation Quantinuum carried into its IPO process."
In March the government committed up to £2bn to quantum. Its ProQure competition will award up to ten contracts of up to £14m each, starting on 1 October, to build and validate quantum computers, ahead of a procurement of large-scale machines worth up to £1bn after 2030.
Read-through and what to watch
The state is now a lead investor in UK quantum, not just a funder of grants and research. Other UK quantum companies raising growth rounds can look to the British Business Bank for a large share, and ProQure adds contracts on top. For OQC, the government may be both a large shareholder and its first large customer.
Europe's quantum leaders are funded at a fraction of US scale. OQC's and IQM's rounds are each about a third of PsiQuantum's and a quarter of Quantinuum's listing. That leaves open, for the others, the route Oxford Ionics took: a sale to a US company.
TITAN: whether it arrives on time.
ProQure: whether OQC wins a phase 1 contract.
Named paying customers beyond research projects.
The US: OQC U.S. Inc. was dormant in June 2025; where the new money places systems first.
The filings: the shares issued, the price paid, and the next accounts, now due for a period to 31 December 2026.