Quantum Research Races Ahead
Plus, venture dealmaking soars as exits remain stalled
Leading AI model developers are talking about slowing down the pace of innovation, but that is far from the case in another critical field of emerging technology, quantum computing.
Isabelle Bousquette of The WSJ Leadership Institute has an exclusive report today on the new fundraising by Oratomic, a company pushing the boundaries of quantum computing. It raised $475 million, three months after its Series A, the latest sign of growing investor enthusiasm in the nascent technology.
ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures, General Catalyst and Bezos Expeditions co-led the Series-B round, bringing the company’s total funding raised to date to $775 million, and raising its valuation to $5.4 billion from $1.5 billion.
Isabelle writes that Oratomic, founded in 2025, joins a growing class of multibillion-dollar quantum startups building technology that promise to solve problems far beyond the capabilities of today’s best supercomputers, with applications across pharmaceuticals, materials science and other industries.
The Pasadena, Calif., company is focused on building a large-scale, fault-tolerant, error-corrected quantum computer it says will deliver on the commercial promises of quantum computing. First, however, there remains a great deal of work to be done.
Oratomic CEO and co-founder, Dolev Bluvstein says the company’s approach to error correction is a defining and differentiating factor. Error correction is a process that involves ensuring the components of a quantum system, known as qubits, behave correctly and deliver accurate results.
Bluvstein said the company thinks it can develop a meaningful commercial computer with only 10,000 qubits, far lower than the previous industry consensus of 1 million. Bluvstein said he expects Oratomic’s computer to be ready by 2030.
There are still plenty of technical and engineering hurdles, and that’s where Bluvstein said he’s directing the company’s latest funding.
“We have no idea what the business models are going to be. We have no idea exactly what the applications are going to be but what we do know is that we need to cross this tipping point where we can build a working computer that is cheap and manufacturable,” he said. “That’s when this becomes a real technology.”
After the Series A, Vinod Khosla compared his firm’s investment in Oratomic to its early investment in OpenAI.
Martin Mignot, partner at Index Ventures, agreed the OpenAI comparison is apt.
“We had never made an investment in quantum, and to be honest, a lot of the stuff we saw felt pretty sci-fi and really far from ever going commercial,” he said. But Oratomic’s work, he added, felt “a lot closer to being commercially viable and interesting, especially for our timeline for investments.”
U.S. venture dealmaking hit $515.8 billion through the third quarter of 2026, with AI taking nearly 83% of it, but exits remain stalled, according to a PitchBook NVCA Venture Monitor report. Just 18 companies went public in Q3, most in healthcare, and with OpenAI and Anthropic delaying their listings, the broader market is stalled, the report finds, leaving 992 active unicorns and a backlog of IPOs with no clear path to liquidity.
More broadly, however, the IPO delay creates uncertainty for the rest of tech. The market has waited for the megaIPOs to list, which has kept liquidity constrained, prevented investment in other listings, and slowed the flow of capital back to LPs. More companies have become unicorns this year (179) than have completed an IPO in any year except 2021.
However, the backlog of companies that need to, or should have, gone public in the past few years is more than two full years of IPOs. The market is growing faster than ever, compounding the liquidity problem that even a couple of trillion-dollar companies will not be able to alleviate.