Quantum of unicorn: Q-CTRL hits $1.4 billion valuation from $425m Series C

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The round led by existing backer Salesforce Ventures, with the federal government’s National Reconstruction Fund chipping in $70m.

Q-CTRL has raised US$290 million (A$425m) in a Series C that makes the Sydney quantum software scaleup the country’s first quantum unicorn, valued at more than US$1 billion (A$1bn)

The round led by existing backer Salesforce Ventures, with the federal government’s National Reconstruction Fund (NRF) chipping in $70m, alongside chipmaker AMD’s venture arm and Jared Kushner’s PE firm Affinity Partners, SPARX Asset Management, and returning investors including Alpha Edison, Alumni Ventures, Bullhound Capital, DCVC, In-Q-Tel, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Main Sequence, Ridgeline, Salesforce Ventures, Salus Ventures, and Square Peg.

Q-CTRL says it expanded the round twice to meet investor demand and it’s a record private raise to for a quantum software business. The funds will be used to help it sell its computing software to finance and energy companies and get its navigation tech into more aircraft and autonomous vehicles.

It’s nearly four years since Salesforce Ventures first backed Q-CTRL in February 2023, leading a $39m Series B extension. That round, worth $166m all up, took nearly three years to close, kicking off $35 million in late 2021 and closed in October 2024 when the UK’s Bullhound led an $88 million top-up. There was also a $22 Series A in 2019.

Q-CTRL was founded in 2017 by University of Sydney quantum physicist Michael Biercuk to tackle a core problem with quantum computers. They’re so sensitive to interference that errors can creep into a calculation before it finishes. Q-CTRL uses AI to suppress those errors. Developers us the software on IBM quantum computers to simulate how electrons behave in materials.

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Meanwhile Q-CTRL’s Ironstone Opal navigation system measures tiny variations in the Earth’s magnetic field and matches them to a map, giving pilots a way to work out where they are when GPS is jammed or unavailable.

Last year the company landed two contracts worth a combined $38 million…

“Q-C…

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