News & Insights
OQC Closes Europe’s Largest Private Quantum Round
Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) has closed an oversubscribed £260m ($350m) Series C, the largest private funding round ever raised by a quantum computing company in Europe. OTIF Ventures is proud to have participated as a continuing investor in this milestone raise.
Led by Bullhound Capital and anchored by a £100m investment from the British Business Bank, its largest direct investment to date, the round drew a broad syndicate of institutional and strategic investors. New entrants include Mastercard, with whom OQC is actively co-developing quantum-enhanced fraud detection for the payments industry, alongside Fynveur, COFIDES, Rokos Capital Management, Fulcrum Asset Management, Pentland Ventures and Magdalen College Oxford. The participation of Magdalen marks a notable development in the Oxford ecosystem as college endowments begin to invest directly back into their university alongside traditional venture funds.
OQC was spun out of Oxford Physics Department in 2017, pioneering a superconducting qubit architecture that prioritises speed and qubit stability both qualities suited to the latency demands of commercial deployments. OQC offered the UK and Europe’s first cloud based Quantum Compute-as-a-Service (QCaaS) becoming available to beta partners in 2021. In 2022, OQC increased their QCaaS public access through amazon web services and launched the new “Toshiko” computer with Equinix who opened the technology up to businesses worldwide through its datacentre in Tokyo. OQC followed this up in 2023 by launching a system with Cyxtera’s in the UK and another system in 2025 at JFK10 in Manhattan with Digital Realty. The company deploys quantum systems inside data centres, allowing customers to buy compute time via the cloud. Live systems now operate across Europe, the US and Asia, with two further sites yet to be announced.
The Series C will fund global expansion and the development of next-generation systems. Recent partnerships with NVIDIA on its NVQLink quantum-AI interconnect and the onboarding of JPMorganChase & AMD as the first user of a dedicated quantum-AI platform in London speak to the commercial trajectory OQC is pursuing. Quantum is no longer a laboratory exercise for the company, it is infrastructure within commercial settings.
OTIF Ventures has backed OQC since its early stages as part of our focus on innovative deep tech solutions with potential for meaningful global impact across medicine, economics and the environment. We remain firmly behind the team and the mission as OQC scales towards becoming a defining institution of the commercial quantum era.