On October 10, Taichi Quantum (Shanghai) Quantum Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Taichi Quantum) announced the completion of a new round of funding. Since its establishment in January this year, the company has raised a cumulative total of over 1 billion yuan. New investors in this round include Jinqiu Fund, Yunbai Capital, Hongruida Investment, Chengdu High-tech Vision Fund, and Lingang Frontier Investment, while existing shareholders such as Huakong Fund, Hengxu Capital, Boyuan Capital, Gaomai Investment, and Yarui Capital continued to increase their stakes. Jinqiu Fund, which participated in the investment, confirmed this round on its official channel the same day. The company did not disclose the funding amount or valuation for this round.
This is Taichi Quantum's third publicly announced funding round this year. The company was founded in January, completed an angel round of over 100 million yuan in March led by Shanghai Future Industry Fund and iFlytek Ventures, with industrial participants including JinkoSolar Co., Ltd. and Galaxy General Robotics Co., Ltd. following on; in June, it completed a 300 million yuan Pre-A round co-led by Gaorong Ventures and IDG Capital. Less than four months after the previous round, the company secured another new round of capital.
Taichi Quantum is betting on the ytterbium (Yb) atomic system within the neutral atom quantum computing route. This approach uses lasers to trap individual atoms in optical tweezer arrays, using atomic energy levels as qubits. With advantages such as good atomic uniformity and easy array scalability, it is regarded as one of the more promising universal quantum computing routes outside of superconducting approaches. In March this year, Google Quantum AI, which had long focused on the superconducting route, announced it would incorporate neutral atom quantum computing into its research system, exploring it in parallel with superconducting, giving the neutral atom route another endorsement from a leading technology company.
The company disclosed that within 8 months of founding, it has completed three engineering milestones: full integration of its first prototype machine in about 6 months; real-time control latency entering the 10-microsecond range; and its quantum compiler "Luoshu" was open-sourced globally in September. The company also stated it aims to form an engineering system with automatic error correction capabilities by the end of the year, demonstrating logical qubits through quantum error correction—meaning qubits that can operate reliably for extended periods after correction. The team has nearly 100 members from institutions and companies including MIT, the University of Cambridge, the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore, and Microsoft.
The industrialization of this route is not starting from scratch. Among domestic peers, Zhongke Kuyuan Technology (Wuhan) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Zhongke Kuyuan) has accumulated orders exceeding 40 million yuan for its neutral atom quantum computer "Hanyuan-1" and achieved exports, while the first order for "Hanyuan-2" has been signed; French neutral atom quantum computing company Pasqal listed on Nasdaq through a SPAC in August this year. At the policy level, quantum technology has been included in the forward-looking layout of future industries in the "15th Five-Year Plan" outline. Taichi Quantum previously also participated in the "first order" matchmaking event for frontier technologies organized by the Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission and the Municipal State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.
The cumulative funding of over 1 billion yuan provides Taichi Quantum with the financial foundation for R&D and engineering investment, but commercial validation has only just begun. Whether the year-end logical qubit goal can be fulfilled and how much the error rate after correction can improve compared to the physical error rate are the first falsifiable milestones for whether Taichi Quantum's technical route holds. The purchaser and procurement content of the "first order" remain to be disclosed—whether it is for a complete machine or computing power, or research collaboration and demonstration procurement, will determine whether Shanghai's cultivation model of "government matchmaking plus state-owned capital orders" can be replicated. Whether industrial investors such as JinkoSolar and Galaxy General Robotics, which entered in the angel round, can transition from financial investment to real application customers is a question for which no public information can currently provide an answer, and relevant parties have not disclosed business cooperation arrangements.
The company has not disclosed revenue. Collaborations in nuclear industry, energy and chemicals, new energy and materials, biopharmaceuticals, and finance are at the stage of joint research, technical validation, and POC. The year-end logical qubit goal comes from the company's own planning and has no third-party verification. As the industry advances toward fault-tolerant quantum computing, merely expanding the number of physical qubits is no longer sufficient to prove system capabilities, and the quality of logical qubits after error correction is becoming one of the more critical validation metrics. For Taichi Quantum, the year-end logical qubit demonstration will be the company's first technical report card after obtaining over 1 billion yuan in funding.