Q-CTRL raises $290 million for quantum control software

What was announced

On 12 November 2026 Q-CTRL, a quantum technology company founded in Sydney in 2017 by Michael J. Biercuk, announced that it had closed a Series C funding round of US$290 million (A$415 million). Salesforce Ventures led the round, with significant participation from Bullhound Capital and Affinity Partners. Q-CTRL says the round was oversubscribed and expanded twice.

New investors include AMD Ventures, the defence group EDGE, MPower Partners, SPARX Asset Management and Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation, a federal investment body. Returning investors include DCVC, In-Q-Tel, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Main Sequence and Square Peg.

The company calls itself the newest quantum unicorn but gave no valuation. The National Reconstruction Fund Corporation said the round valued Q-CTRL at more than US$1 billion and that its own A$70 million stake is the federal government’s largest direct quantum investment so far. Quantum Computing Report describes the round as the largest private raise for a software-focused quantum company; Q-CTRL makes the same claim.^[1,2,3,4]

What Q-CTRL sells

Q-CTRL does not build quantum computers. Its products sit between hardware and users. Fire Opal and Boulder Opal design the control pulses and error-suppression steps that make a given processor behave closer to its ideal, and are offered on IBM’s and other companies’ machines. Black Opal is a training product. In the same week Q-CTRL reported automated calibration of a 21-qubit processor from QuantWare and new Fire Opal functions in IBM’s catalogue.

The second line of business is sensing. Ironstone Opal is a navigation system that uses quantum magnetometers to locate a vehicle against the Earth’s magnetic field when GPS is unavailable or jammed. Q-CTRL has flight-tested it with Airbus and Lockheed Martin, and on 11 November announced that it had passed RTCA DO-160, the standard environmental qualification for airborne equipment.^[1,2,5]

What the money is for

Q-CTRL says it will expand its software products and scale globally across finance, energy, defence, aerospace and government customers, and continue its autonomy and aerospace programmes. Quantum Computing Report adds that the company plans to grow in Japan’s industrial and high-performance computing sectors, where two of the new investors are based. No breakdown between the computing and sensing businesses was given.^[1,2]

How to read it

This is a financing event. It shows that investors, including a national fund and several defence-linked backers, will pay unicorn prices for control software and quantum sensing; it does not by itself show new technical capability. The announcement and investor quotes repeat Q-CTRL’s performance claims, such as a materials simulation on IBM hardware said to run more than 3,000 times faster than a leading classical method and navigation said to be 100 times better than the best alternative, but the release does not give the methods behind them, and they have not been independently checked here.

The round fits a pattern seen this autumn, with Intel agreeing to buy the software company Classiq: much of the money in quantum computing is now going to the layers that make imperfect hardware usable, while the hardware itself is still being scaled.