Draft:QuiX Quantum
 | This article may incorporate text from a large language model, which is prohibited in Wikipedia articles. (August 2026) |
Where to get help
How to improve a draft
You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Editor resources
|  |
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Quantum computing, Photonics |
| Founded | 2019 |
| Founders | Jelmer Renema, Hans van den Vlekkert |
| Headquarters | , Netherlands |
| Key people | Stefan Hengesbach (CEO) |
| Products | Photonic quantum processors, photonic quantum computers, quantum cloud computing services |
| Website | quixquantum |
QuiX Quantum is a Dutch-German quantum computing company headquartered in Enschede, Netherlands. The company develops photonic quantum computers and quantum photonic processors based on silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits.[1][2] Founded in 2019 as a spin-off of the University of Twente, it supplies photonic processors to research institutions and is developing universal photonic quantum computers, notably for the German Aerospace Center (DLR) under a contract awarded in 2022.[3] The company raised seed funding in 2022 and a Series A round in 2025, launched a quantum cloud computing service in 2024, and has published research on error mitigation as part of a roadmap toward fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing.[2][4][5]
History
[edit]Founding and early processors (2019–2021)
[edit]QuiX Quantum was founded in January 2019 by Jelmer Renema and Hans van den Vlekkert to commercialize quantum photonic processors based on silicon nitride waveguide technology developed at the University of Twente and the Amsterdam research institute AMOLF.[1][6] The spin-off grew out of research by a University of Twente group that included Renema, Pepijn Pinkse, Klaus Boller, Willem Vos and Ad Lagendijk, and was supported by pre-seed investor RAPH2INVEST.[1] Van den Vlekkert, a photonics entrepreneur and founder of LioniX International, served as the company's first chief executive officer, while Renema became chief technology officer.[6][2]
The company's technology built on a reconfigurable silicon nitride photonic chip with 128 tunable components, developed at the University of Twente by Caterina Taballione as part of her PhD research and originally intended for classical applications such as 5G beamforming and precision wavelength measurement.[7] Sending single photons through the chip, instead of the continuous light used for its original purpose, revealed that its components could also support quantum effects such as entanglement and superposition, which led to the founding of QuiX.[7]
In research published in 2019, a team of researchers from QuiX Quantum, the University of Twente, LioniX International and the University of Oxford (including Ian Walmsley, who later co-founded ORCA Computing) demonstrated an 8×8 reconfigurable quantum photonic processor based on silicon nitride waveguides, described as the largest programmable circuit reported on that material platform at the time.[8][1]
In 2021, QuiX Quantum researchers published a 12-mode universal quantum photonic processor.[9] In March 2022, the company commercially launched a 20-mode processor[6][10] The 20-mode silicon nitride processor, developed in part within the EU-funded PHOQUSING project and later described in a peer-reviewed publication has an average optical loss of 2.9 dB per mode, and contains nearly 400 tunable elements.[2][11] According to the company, its 12- and 20-mode processors were in use at research institutions in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Hungary.[2]
Seed funding and DLR contract (2022–2023)
[edit]In June 2022, Stefan Hengesbach, previously managing director of the German photonic and quantum technology company Q.ANT, was appointed CEO, with van den Vlekkert stepping back from operational management while remaining a director and shareholder.[2][6]
In July 2022, QuiX Quantum raised a seed round of 5.5 million euros from PhotonDelta, FORWARD.one and the regional development agency Oost NL. The round was the first major investment by PhotonDelta after the Dutch photonics ecosystem organization received 1.1 billion euros in public and private funding.[2][6]
In September 2022, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) awarded QuiX Quantum a contract worth 14 million euros to develop prototype photonic quantum computers within the DLR Quantum Computing Initiative (QCI).[3] Under the four-year project, the company is to deliver a universal 8-qubit system and subsequently a system with at least 64 qubits, developed at the DLR Innovation Center in Ulm, Germany.[12][3] The contract was described as the first commercial sale of universal quantum computers based on photonics.[3] The systems implement measurement-based quantum computing, in which computations are carried out through sequences of measurements on entangled photonic states rather than through circuit-style quantum gates.[12]
Cloud service and later developments (2024–2026)
[edit]In 2024, QuiX Quantum began offering cloud access to its quantum systems through its Bia cloud computing service.[4][5] The same year, the company reported the on-chip generation of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states, three-photon entangled states used as building blocks for the larger resource states of measurement-based photonic quantum computing.[13]
In July 2025, the company raised 15 million euros in Series A funding, co-led by Invest-NL and the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, with participation from PhotonVentures, Oost NL and FORWARD.one. The funding followed the company's selection for the EIC Accelerator program and was intended to finance a first-generation universal photonic quantum computer, with a next-generation system focused on error correction planned to follow.[4][14]
In April 2026, QuiX Quantum reported the demonstration of below-threshold error mitigation on a photonic quantum computer, in collaboration with NASA's Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL), the University of Twente and the Free University of Berlin.[5][15] In the experiment, carried out on a 20-mode processor accessed through the Bia cloud platform, a photon distillation protocol reduced photon indistinguishability errors.[15] Commenting on the work, David DiVincenzo of Forschungszentrum Jülich, who was not involved in the research, described the photon distillation scheme as a step toward reducing the resource costs of future photonic quantum processors.[15]
In 2026, the company also outlined a system architecture for fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing, based on logical qubits with protection against photon loss and intended for deployment in data center and high-performance computing environments.[16]
Technology
[edit]QuiX Quantum builds quantum computing hardware in which quantum information is encoded in single photons. Its processors are reconfigurable multimode interferometers fabricated as silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits, in which programmable optical elements such as Mach-Zehnder interferometers implement linear-optical transformations on light propagating through waveguides.[7][11] Because photonic circuits and most supporting components operate at room temperature, the approach does not depend as much on the cryogenic cooling required by, e.g., superconducting and trapped-ion platforms.[1][2]
The company's universal quantum computing systems follow the measurement-based model of quantum computation and combine its photonic processors with single-photon sources, single-photon detectors and fast feed-forward electronics.[12][3] A principal engineering challenge of the photonic approach is photon loss, and the company's fault-tolerance roadmap is based on logical qubits with loss-error detection and correction.[16]
See also
[edit]References
[edit]- 1 2 3 4 5 "New Dutch silicon nitride photonics company, QuiX, aims at quantum computing". Laser Focus World. 28 January 2019. Retrieved 14 July 2026.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "QuiX raises €5.5M for photonic quantum computer". optics.org. 7 July 2022. Retrieved 14 July 2026.
- 1 2 3 4 5 "Quix, German Aerospace Center in €14M deal for photonic quantum computers". Inside Quantum Technology. 27 September 2022. Retrieved 14 July 2026.
- 1 2 3 "Photonic quantum startup QuiX Quantum closes €15m Series A round". Data Center Dynamics. July 2025. Retrieved 14 July 2026.
- 1 2 3 "Knocking on quantum's door: QuiX claims photonic error reduction breakthrough". Data Center Knowledge. April 2026. Retrieved 14 July 2026.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Yoshida, Anne-Françoise (July 2022). "QuiX Quantum raises €5.5M in seed funding". EE Times Europe. Retrieved 14 July 2026.
- 1 2 3 "Twente develops optical chip with 128 components". optics.org. 22 July 2019. Retrieved 14 July 2026.
- ↑ Taballione, Caterina; Wolterink, Tom A. W.; Lugani, Jasleen (2019). "8×8 reconfigurable quantum photonic processor based on silicon nitride waveguides". Optics Express. 27 (19): 26842–26857. doi:10.1364/OE.27.026842.
- ↑ Taballione, Caterina; van der Meer, Reinier; Snijders, Henk J. (2021). "A universal fully reconfigurable 12-mode quantum photonic processor". Materials for Quantum Technology. 1 (3): 035002. doi:10.1088/2633-4356/ac168c.
- ↑ "World's most powerful photonic quantum processor made in Twente". Bits&Chips. March 2022. Retrieved 14 July 2026.
- 1 2 Taballione, Caterina; Correa Anguita, Malaquias; de Goede, Michiel (2023). "20-Mode Universal Quantum Photonic Processor". Quantum. 7: 1071. doi:10.22331/q-2023-08-01-1071.
- 1 2 3 "Computing with light". German Aerospace Center (DLR). 23 September 2022. Retrieved 14 July 2026.
- ↑ "Dutch-based QuiX Quantum's new breakthrough unlocks novel way to scale photonic quantum computing". Silicon Canals. 16 May 2024. Retrieved 14 July 2026.
- ↑ "UT spin-off QuiX Quantum secures €15 million to build photonic quantum computer". University of Twente. 14 July 2025. Retrieved 14 July 2026.
- 1 2 3 "Quix claims first below-threshold error reduction in photonic quantum computing". Bits&Chips. 2 April 2026. Retrieved 14 July 2026.
- 1 2 Morgan, Timothy Prickett (7 July 2026). "QuiX Quantum shows off a photonic architecture for HPC datacenters". The Next Platform. Retrieved 14 July 2026.
| General | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Theorems | |||||||||
| Quantum communication |
| ||||||||
| Quantum algorithms | |||||||||
| Quantum complexity theory | |||||||||
| Quantum processor benchmarks | |||||||||
| Quantum computing models | |||||||||
| Quantum error correction | |||||||||
| Physical implementations |
| ||||||||
| Quantum programming | |||||||||
Category:Quantum computing companies Category:Photonics companies Category:Dutch companies established in 2019 Category:Companies based in Enschede Category:University spin-offs
Please delete the portions which were LLM-generated, and summarize in your own words a range of independent, reliable, published sources that discuss the subject. If you have used an LLM but you believe that your use is covered by one of the two exceptions (basic copyediting and translation between two languages in which you are fully fluent), please provide a transcript of the prompt(s) you used while writing your draft (see the how-to guide). Reviewers can make mistakes. If you have not received any LLM assistance, you may seek a second opinion at the AfC Help Desk.
See the advice page on large language models for more information.