It’s pretty bold for a five-year-old startup to say it wants to be “the Microsoft of quantum computing.” Then again, when you show up making that statement with $110 million in new funding in your pocket, it gets a little easier to believe you are at least on the right path.
Classiq, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, just announced a Series C fundraising of $110 million that pushes its total funding to about $173 million. The round was led by Entrée Capital, with participation from Norwest, NightDragon, funds managed by Hamilton Lane, Clal, Neva SGR, Phoenix, Team8, IN Venture, Wing, HSBC, Samsung Next, and QBeat, as well as other new and existing investors.
The funding comes after Classig has worked with numerous big-name firms on quantum computing software projects, including BMW, Citi, Deloitte, Rolls-Royce, Mizuho, and Toshiba. Classiq also was among Nvidia’s very first round of quantum computing collaborators, and also has partnered with AWS and Classiq’s self-proclaimed role model–Microsoft.
That’s a luminous list of associates, and what’s won them over is Classiq’s progress in creating the quantum computing arena’s version of a software stack. “We are building the Microsoft of quantum computing,” said Nir Minerbi, CEO and Co-founder of Classiq in a statement. “In this new era of computing, Classiq is delivering the essential software stack to empower the development of real-world quantum applications.”
The company offers a quantum computer programming language, capabilities of quantum algorithm developments, and a faster alternative to gate-level modeling of computing circuits that helps users analyze and optimize the structure of their quantum computing circuits.
While Classiq is trying to build another Microsoft, it has more often been compared to the electronic design automation (EDA) houses serving the traditional semiconductor industry, like Synopsys and Cadence Design Systems. Its approach has been described as “EDA-inspired,” and the description seemed even more appropriate after Classiq’s Series B round investors back in early 2022 included former Synopsys CEO Harvey Jones and then-former CEO of Cadence Lip-Bu Tan, who more recently became CEO of Intel.
However, as the phrasing suggests, “EDA-inspired” does not necessarily mean EDA exactly as it is used in traditional chip manufacturing, according to Simon Fried, vice president of marketing and business development at Classiq.
As Fried told Fierce Electronics via email, “The scale bottleneck that Classiq's technology targets isn’t fabricating more qubits—it’s producing the logic that makes thousands of hardware qubits useful. In quantum computing the ‘chip’ is a circuit diagram of gates and qubit flows rather than the hardware itself. As machines grow from 100 to 10,000 logical qubits, that chip/circuit can reach millions of gates—far beyond what humans can hand‑code or a transpiler can simply reorder.”
He added, “Classiq treats that logical circuit exactly the way EDA treats a silicon design. So while the analogy is EDA, we’re not designing the qubit hardware; we’re designing the logical blueprint that hardware will execute. Fried concluded that the result could be described as a “software chip.”
Now, the company has an additional $110 million behind its “software chip” vision, and Classiq said that as a result it will be able to significantly scale its go-to-market, customer success and R&D teams, and expand its global footprint.
Classiq is no Microsoft just yet, but it’s getting a little bit closer.