A Zurich startup wants to build quantum chips the way Intel builds CPUs. It just raised $25.5M to try.

A Zurich quantum hardware startup called ZuriQ just put nine ions in a 3x3 grid on a chip, then ran the chip on Infineon's commercial semiconductor production line. The work, reported by Quantum Computing Report, is small by the standards of larger trapped-ion peers, but the chip underneath it is the point.

Conventional trapped-ion quantum computers, the kind built by IonQ and Quantinuum, hold their qubits in a single-file chain and steer them with rapidly oscillating radio waves called radio-frequency (RF) electric fields. ZuriQ's design drops the radio waves. The Zurich spinout uses stationary magnets and electric fields, a configuration physicists call a Penning trap, to hold its ions in place. The architecture lets more ions sit on the same chip area, instead of stringing them out in a line.

That matters for manufacturing. RF-driven traps need high-voltage, high-frequency signals that dissipate heat and resist integration with standard silicon processes. Static-field traps do not. ZuriQ's bet is that the same approach lets ion-trap chips ride the same production lines as the rest of the semiconductor industry, replacing the bespoke physics-lab fabrication that has long defined the category.

ZuriQ was spun out of ETH Zürich in 2024 by Pavel Hrmo, Tobias Sägesser, and Shreyans Jain. ZuriQ worked with Infineon Technologies to fabricate the nine-ion chip on the German chipmaker's production lines. The resulting demonstrator, built in 18 months, is the largest two-dimensional trapped-ion array of its kind so far, per the Quantum Computing Report write-up. Foundational work on the design has appeared in Nature and Science Advances, showing arbitrary 2D and 3D ion shuttling and two-qubit gate operations in the static-field architecture.

Now the company has capital to scale the bet. ZuriQ raised $25.5M (€22.4M) in a seed round led by Quantonation, with Forward.one, Extantia, and Firgun Ventures joining, alongside existing early-stage investors. The round follows a $4.2M pre-seed in 2025.

The next milestone is a 40-ion processor on the same industrial process, a stepping stone rather than a finished chip. The static-field design gets the company onto a foundry line. Whether the architecture can match the gate fidelities of mature RF-based chains, and whether standard CMOS foundries can keep up with ion-trap precision at scale, are the open questions the next round of work has to answer.

The team plans to grow from its current 18 people with the new funding. The 40-ion run is the next dated checkpoint.