How the quantum race will be won on the factory floor

Quantum computing has been the subject of breath­taking demon­stra­tions and breath­taking hype. But demon­stra­tions don’t become successful companies on their own. At DCVC, we’re experienced in investing across the quantum stack. That experience has taught us to focus on which platform can be manu­fac­tured. The winning archi­tec­tures will be the ones that can be indus­tri­al­ized — not just demonstrated.

That conviction is why we are thrilled to announce that DCVC is leading Quantum Motion’s $160M Series C alongside Kembara. This isn’t just an investment in a yet-another quantum company. It is a bet on indus­tri­al­iza­tion, on the thesis that the next generation of trans­for­ma­tive computing infra­struc­ture will be manu­fac­tured on the same foundation that supported the last one: silicon.

The semi­con­ductor leverage 

The global semi­con­ductor fabrication ecosystem represents one of humanity’s greatest concen­tra­tions of industrial capability: hundreds of billions in installed capital, thousands of optimized processes, and decades of hard-won yield-improvement know-how. Any quantum hardware company that can tap into this infra­struc­ture doesn’t need to rebuild from scratch. It inherits a head start.

This is the core of the silicon-spin qubit platform. Quantum Motion’s qubits are formed by individual electrons trapped in gate-defined quantum dots, with quantum information encoded in the electrons’ spin states. These structures are patterned lith­o­graph­i­cally in standard CMOS foundry processes — the same process control, yield opti­miza­tion, and defect management that underpin the classical semi­con­ductor industry. The manu­fac­turing overlap is not incidental. It is the strategy.

The density advantage is similarly staggering: each physical qubit occupies less than 0.04 µm², enabling qubit densities exceeding one million per square millimeter. All four million physical qubits in Quantum Motion’s target archi­tec­ture fit within roughly one square millimeter of a single centimeter-scale chip — with room to grow. 

Archi­tec­ture built to scale

Quantum Motion has made a series of archi­tec­tural choices that distinguish its approach from the canonical playbook. Rather than dense two-dimensional arrays with fixed nearest-neighbor coupling — the standard surface code approach — they have developed and patented archi­tec­tures based on mobile qubits and shared control.

The system is built on bilinear arrays of exchange-coupled quantum dots enabling efficient fan-out, control, and measurement. Electrons can be physically shuttled between sites, bringing qubits into proximity for two-qubit operations without requiring long-range couplers or dense inter­con­nects. Many qubits share common control lines with local tuning for parameter matching, which dramat­i­cally reduces wiring complexity — avoiding the inter­con­nect explosion that threatens to cap other platforms well short of the million-qubit mark.

These bilinear arrays are connected through control­lable couplers into looped-pipeline archi­tec­tures that enable three-dimensional logical connec­tivity in a physically two-dimensional device. The result is a compact, fault-tolerant layout that can sustain up to 3,400 logical qubits in a single circuit at a logical error rate of 10⁻¹².

A critical advantage underpins all of this: Quantum Motion’s platform integrates cryo-CMOS control electronics directly alongside the qubits, at scale. Quantum Motion designs these cryo-CMOS chips in-house and fabricates them on Glob­al­Foundries’ process, placing high-speed DACs, low-noise amplifiers, and multi­plexing networks at cryogenic stages close to the qubit plane. This reduces signal latency, improves fidelity, and cuts the cabling that would otherwise make million-qubit systems physically unmanageable.

The road to fault tolerance

The quantum industry is tran­si­tioning from Noisy Inter­me­diate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) processors toward fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC). DARPA’s Quantum Bench­marking Initiative — among the most rigorous external evaluations of quantum hardware anywhere in the world — has advanced Quantum Motion to Stage B, where the path to commercial utility is tested under real-world conditions. Silicon spin has become the most represented qubit modality in the QBI pipeline. That is not an accident. It reflects a growing recognition across the community that manu­fac­tura­bility is inseparable from the path to fault tolerance.

In 2025, Quantum Motion delivered the world’s first full-stack silicon CMOS quantum computer to the U.K. National Quantum Computing Centre — a system housed in three server racks, occupying roughly 15 square meters. This is a quantum system that fits into the footprint of a modern data center. Single-qubit gate fidelities already exceed 99%, gate yields top 99.3%, and the system is designed to tolerate the hard defect rates inherent in any real manufacturing process.

The Series C funds the next milestones on this trajectory: scaling from unit-cell demon­stra­tors to systems of increasing complexity, with a 1,000-qubit looped-pipeline system demon­strating fault tolerance — and a clear roadmap to a one-million-data-qubit machine.

Manu­fac­turing, rein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion, and the quantum supply chain

There is a broader context to this investment that extends beyond any single company’s roadmap. We are in the early innings of a global rein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion — a period in which the nations and companies that control advanced manu­fac­turing capacity will define the next century of economic and security leadership. Semi­con­duc­tors sit at the center of that contest. Quantum hardware, which depends on fabrication tooling, cryogenic packaging, materials science, and the supplier networks that surround them, is inseparable from it.

Quantum Motion’s approach doesn’t just benefit from this reality — it is built on it, bridging the U.K.’s world-class quantum science with the global CMOS supply chain through foundry part­ner­ships with Glob­al­Foundries and Imec. Recently announced initiatives from the U.S. Department of Commerce reflect the same insight: semi­con­ductor and quantum share an industrial base.

Our investment in Quantum Motion is not an isolated bet. It is another pillar of a broader strategy to back nationally critical quantum infra­struc­ture — informed by what we believe is the deepest quantum portfolio in venture capital.

We have been the anchor investor from seed to IPO for several of the world’s most important quantum companies: Atom Computing, Q‑CTRL, Horizon Quantum, Capella Space (now within IonQ), Iceberg Quantum, Logiqal, Mesa Quantum, and others we are enthu­si­astic to announce soon. That experience gives us a clear view of what separates demon­stra­tion from deployment. Quantum Motion represents convergence: scalable qubit design, an archi­tec­ture engineered for manu­fac­tura­bility, and a production base that leverages the silicon fab ecosystem. The company is ensuring that fault-tolerant quantum computing isn’t waiting for some future break­through. It’s being manufactured today.