ZuriQ Secures $25.5M Seed Round and Advances 2D Trapped-Ion Fabrication with Infineon

ZuriQ Secures $25.5M Seed Round and Advances 2D Trapped-Ion Fabrication with Infineon Swiss quantum hardware startup ZuriQ has raised $25.5 million (€22.4M) in seed funding to scale its 2D trapped-ion quantum computing architecture. Spun out of ETH Zürich in 2024 by Dr. Pavel Hrmo, Dr. Tobias Sägesser, and Dr. Shreyans Jain, the company builds on a $4.2 million pre-seed round raised in 2025. The funding round was led by Quantonation, with additional participation from Forward.one, Extantia, Firgun Ventures, and existing early-stage investors. ZuriQ’s hardware platform addresses a fundamental scaling limit in conventional trapped-ion systems. While legacy architectures rely on radio-frequency (RF) Paul traps that constrain ions into single-file 1D chains stitched together via complex physical grid junctions, ZuriQ utilizes micro-Penning traps. By replacing rapidly oscillating RF electric fields with static magnetic and electric fields, the architecture allows ions to move freely in two and three dimensions without physical junction bottlenecks. Consequently, qubit density scales quadratically with the surface area of the chip rather than linearly with chain length, laying an architectural foundation for multi-thousand-qubit systems. A key pillar of ZuriQ’s commercial roadmap is its strategic foundry partnership with Infineon Technologies AG, established to co-develop advanced ion-trap chips using industrial semiconductor fabrication lines. Infineon brings over half a decade of specialized trapped-ion chip manufacturing experience to the collaboration. Because ZuriQ’s static-field Penning technology eliminates high-voltage, high-frequency RF signals that typically dissipate heat into the chip substrate, the design allows straightforward integration into standard silicon CMOS processes, bridging the gap between academic physics experiments and mass-producible quantum chips. The company has validated its design through a working nine-ion 3×3 demonstrator array—the largest two-dimensional array of its kind to date—built within 18 months in collaboration with ETH Zürich and fabricated on Infineon’s production lines. This milestone follows foundational experimental achievements published in Nature and Science Advances, which demonstrated arbitrary 2D/3D ion shuttling and two-qubit gate operations in micro-Penning traps. ZuriQ is currently leveraging this industrial process to develop its next-generation 40-ion processor as a stepping stone toward full chip-scale scaling. With its seed capital in place, ZuriQ plans to expand its 18-person technical team, which has already recruited talent from leading quantum and optics organizations such as IonQ, Xanadu, and Hamamatsu. The funding will directly accelerate research and development operations, scale chip fabrication throughput with Infineon, and advance the platform toward commercial utility. By combining native 2D qubit geometry with established semiconductor manufacturing, ZuriQ aims to deliver trapped-ion processors capable of supporting industrially relevant fault-tolerant workloads. Review the official seed funding announcement here, read about the Infineon chip fabrication partnership here, examine regional startup coverage here, and explore our previous coverage of ZuriQ’s pre-seed funding round here. July 29, 2026 Mohamed Abdel-Kareem2026-07-29T06:06:59-07:00 Leave A Comment Cancel replyComment Type in the text displayed above Δ This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.