State of Quantum Funding

Live dataset snapshot

As of the 2026-11 data cutoff, the ledger tracks 62 companies, 52 published financing events and about $17.0B of disclosed capital across 16 countries. 37 events are human-reviewed and 15 still carry an unverified auto-collected flag. The five largest rows (Quantinuum, PsiQuantum, IonQ, SandboxAQ, D-Wave Quantum) account for roughly 47% of the total.

By region

By technology

Shares are computed from disclosed cash only; grants, letters of intent and undisclosed rounds are not included. Figures change with every daily build.

1. The shape of the capital

Quantum technology financing is not a smooth distribution. A small number of full-stack hardware companies absorb a large share of disclosed capital, while the majority of tracked companies sit one or two orders of magnitude below them. That is not a bubble signal or a verdict on technical merit; it follows from what building a quantum computer actually requires. Fabrication partnerships, cryogenic or vacuum infrastructure, control electronics, a specialist engineering headcount and multi-year test facilities are fixed costs that do not shrink because a team is clever.

This concentration has a practical consequence for anyone reading a ranking table: the top three rows usually explain more of the total than the entire lower half combined. Comparing the fourth row to the fifth is a comparison between two companies; comparing the first row to the fifth is a comparison between two different capital models. We therefore publish the median alongside the total on each subpage, because the median is the number that describes a typical company in that cohort.

2. Four capital profiles, one table

The most common analytical mistake is to treat every row as a venture round. Four different things sit in the same column:

1. Full-stack private companies. Large, infrequent rounds tied to fabrication, deployment or system-delivery milestones. These dominate the top of the table.
2. Public-market issuers. IPOs, secondary offerings and at-the-market programmes. These raise balance-sheet cash, not a priced round, and are often drawn down over months. A headline programme size is not a single-date injection.
3. Component and control-stack suppliers. Smaller rounds, but often earlier revenue and shorter paths to commercial viability. They look small in a funding ranking precisely because their capital needs are smaller.
4. Policy-linked entities. State capital, grants and letters of intent. In many cases no priced equity changed hands at all. We keep them visible because they explain industrial structure, but they do not represent a comparable cash round.

Before comparing two adjacent rows, identify which of the four each belongs to. That single step resolves most apparent anomalies in the table.

3. Disclosure bias is bigger than the real gaps

A ranking built from disclosed financing measures disclosure as well as capital. US companies file with the SEC and announce rounds with named investors and precise amounts. Chinese rounds are frequently reported in RMB with vague phrasing such as “several hundred million”, and state-linked capital may appear as registered capital rather than a priced round. European totals vary enormously depending on whether a tracker includes EIC grants and procurement contracts.

We convert non-USD figures at approximate rates and treat vague disclosures as lower bounds. That means a gap between a Chinese and an American row is partly a gap in reporting conventions. Saying “company A raised ten times company B” is defensible only if both figures came from comparable filing regimes; we prefer to say “company A has ten times the disclosed capital”, which is what the data actually supports. The methodology page documents each of these choices.

4. Public markets changed the meaning of “funding”

Once quantum companies listed, the funding column stopped being purely about venture conviction. An at-the-market programme is a financing facility: the company may sell shares into the market over many months at prevailing prices. Including the full programme size alongside a Series C makes the totals comparable as cash raised, but not as a negotiated private valuation. We store valuation in a separate field and never add it to the total; mixing the two systematically inflates companies that happened to announce a down round or a SPAC.

The same logic applies to STAR Market listings in China. They are essential for understanding the domestic QKD supply chain, but reading them as startup rounds would badly misstate how that ecosystem was financed. On event notes we label these capital types explicitly rather than smoothing them into a single “raised” verb.

5. Regional structure is about institutions, not just geography

The United States leads on private venture depth and public-market access. China combines startup financing with state capital and a national QKD build-out, so its table mixes two funding systems. Europe blends venture rounds with EU and national grant programmes and has unusually deep hardware supply chains — foundries, cryogenics, qubit-chip startups — that a capital-only ranking underweights. Canada's corridors around Waterloo and Sherbrooke produce a small but technically dense cohort. Asia-Pacific and the Middle East are concentrated in specific niches: silicon-spin and diamond platforms, quantum control software, and photonic computing.

A per-region ranking is therefore most useful as a map of how each ecosystem finances itself, not as a league table of national competitiveness. The global table and the government capital tracker let you switch between those two readings.

6. What would actually change the ranking

• A new regulatory filing with a precise amount and date.
• A confirmed IPO, secondary offering or a drawn-down tranche of an ATM programme.
• A large sovereign or strategic investment with a disclosed cash value.
• A correction to an RMB conversion or to a previously vague disclosure.
• A change in our own counting rules — always recorded on the corrections log.

A technical breakthrough alone does not move a single row. That asymmetry is the single biggest limitation of a funding ranking, and the reason we publish the raw JSON: a reader who cares about gate fidelity, qubit count or commercial revenue should build a different table, and can.

7. How to use this data responsibly

Quote figures as approximations, name the capital type, and state the data cutoff. Do not sum a valuation into a funding total. If you are comparing across regions, say which disclosure convention applies. If you are citing a specific company, follow the source link on its event note. And if you find a figure that is wrong, send a primary source — the contact page explains the format, and confirmed fixes are logged publicly.