Quantum Computing & Photonics Startups

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Nabu Optical Systems

United States

Nabu Optical Systems is a Dublin, Ohio semiconductor technology company building maskless optical lithography tools for chip prototyping and small-batch production. Its systems pair projection lithography with direct laser writing and use virtual masks to eliminate costly physical masks, targeting the 180-500 nm node segment for startups, R&D groups, and university and government labs underserved by large-scale fabs. The company was founded by University of Dayton professor Imad Agha and spun out of work commercializing a University of Dayton lithography tool.

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Ora Computing

Austria

Ora Computing is an Austrian deep-tech startup building information-theory-based compression software for large AI models, letting customers shrink LLMs by up to 80% in memory and run them several times faster with minimal accuracy loss. Its hardware-agnostic approach works with standard inference frameworks and targets the cost and energy of AI inference for cloud providers and edge-silicon use cases. The company was founded in 2025 by quantum-computing researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA).

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Applied Physics

United States

Applied Physics is a New York-based independent research collective of scientists, engineers, and inventors working on breakthrough space and gravitational-physics technologies, including theoretical warp-drive propulsion and its Warp Factory analysis toolkit. Founded in 2019 and led by CEO Gianni Martire, it positions itself as a public-benefit research institute advising companies and governments, with affiliated researchers from institutions such as Harvard and CERN. The group gained prominence for its 2021 peer-reviewed work proposing physically constructable warp-drive models.

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Qubic

Canada

Qubic is a Sherbrooke, Quebec-based quantum hardware company, with a second office in Waterloo, Ontario, that develops low-noise cryogenic amplifiers purpose-built to read out signals from superconducting qubits without adding the heat that conventional semiconductor amplifiers introduce. Spun out of the Institut quantique and the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing, its amplifiers are built from quantum materials and target a roughly 10,000x reduction in heat dissipation, one of the main barriers to scaling quantum computers. The company is also building a radio-frequency quantum sensing platform aimed at the quantum-computing and defence markets.

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Seetrum

China

Seetrum (与光科技) is a Beijing-based photonics chip company spun out of Tsinghua University, developing computational spectral chips, snapshot CMOS hyperspectral imaging and AI sensing solutions. It is building a light-chip platform for next-generation smart terminals spanning spectral sensing to physical-AI vision chips.

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HyperLight

United States

HyperLight is a Cambridge, Massachusetts photonics company that designs and manufactures thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonic integrated circuits for optical interconnects. Its TFLN Chiplet Platform targets AI infrastructure, data centers, and telecom networks, delivering high modulation bandwidth and low optical loss to cut power consumption as link speeds scale toward 400G-per-lane and beyond. The company partners with tier-1 foundries to move TFLN photonics from lab to high-volume production.

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Atom Computing

United States

Atom Computing builds large-scale quantum computers using arrays of optically-trapped neutral atoms, with commercial systems exceeding 1,000 qubits aimed at fault-tolerant, utility-scale computing. The company was first to surpass the 1,000-qubit threshold for a universal gate-based system and has demonstrated quantum error correction on a neutral-atom platform, including installing an early commercial system with logical qubits. It is headquartered in Berkeley, California, with quantum operations in Boulder, Colorado, and serves enterprise and government customers.

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Arkeon

Sweden

Arkeon Technologies is a Gothenburg-based deep-tech startup and Chalmers University spin-out building manufacturing technology for superconducting quantum chips. Its method tunes qubit frequencies after fabrication by driving controlled current pulse-trains through Josephson junction barriers at room temperature, tightening frequency placement to raise yield and lower production costs. The company targets makers of superconducting quantum processors at industrial firms and research institutions.

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A-Star Quantum

Japan

A-Star Quantum (A*Quantum) is a Tokyo-based quantum computing software company founded in 2018. It develops AQCloud, a cloud platform that blends quantum computing with classical mathematical-optimization and AI techniques to solve large-scale combinatorial optimization problems in logistics, manufacturing, transport, energy, and finance. The company is now moving from an R&D and proof-of-concept phase into commercial expansion, and is also building a proprietary high-speed database to support enterprise AI workloads.