Australia’s quantum IC startup Diraq adds funds for US launch

Business news | February 12, 2024

By Peter Clarke

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Full-stack quantum computing startup Diraq Pte. Ltd. (Sydney, Australia) has raised US$15 million in a Series A2 round.

The round was led by specialist venture capital firm Quantonation, with participation from Higgins Family Investments and the University of New South Wales. It brings the total equity funding raised by the 2022 startup to US$35 million. The total funding directed at the technology, including research funding from Australian and US government programs, stands at US$120 million, Diraq claims.

Diraq, founded in 2022 by Professor Andrew Dzurak, makes use of spin in silicon CMOS qubits developed by his team at UNSW Sydney over the past two decades. Professor Dzurak, with colleague Andrea Morello, demonstrated the world’s first silicon qubits in 2012, and over the past decade has developed a scalable qubit technology by reconfiguring CMOS transistors. Diraq has demonstrated qubit control with sufficient fidelity to allow for scalable error correction. The technology does require low-temperature operation.

US launch

The money raised will be used to advanced technology development and begin commercialization of this form of quantum computing. Diraq’s goal is to integrate millions of qubits on a single chip which can subsequently be scaled to billions of qubits

“This new funding will be used to expand our talented team in Australia and launch in the US as well as capitalise on our existing international partnerships,” said Professor Dzurak, CEO and founder of Diraq, in a statement. “To see useful quantum computing deployed cost-efficiently in a commercial timeframe will require billions of qubits. We are working closely with our foundry partners to drive qubit development based on tried and tested CMOS techniques coupled with our proprietary designs. We are focused on delivering energy-efficient processors with billions of qubits on one chip contained in one refrigerator, rather than thousands of chips and refrigerators requiring hundreds of square metres of space in a warehouse.”

Will Zeng, a Quantonation partner who will join Diraq’s board, commented: “The primary technical focus in the next 18 months will be on the development of a device through a standard semiconductor foundry. This milestone will serve as a proof point, solidifying the viability of Diraq’s technology and propelling the company’s ambitious scale-up program aimed at constructing the most powerful quantum computers in the world.”

Diraq plans to take a full-stack approach from quantum hardware through to the application layer and thereby bring quantum computing to multiple application sectors.