From a dorm room to the world's largest private round for a dedicated quantum processor company

When Paul first met Alessandro Bruno, QuantWare was just an idea, quantum was still a distant promise, not as hot as it is today, and Ale’s track record consisted of building chips in the TU Delft lab (his ‘dorm room’) for Intel and Microsoft. ‘Building chips, it's easy’, he said, and we were immediately convinced of his genius. When Matthijs Rijlaarsdam joined as co-founder shortly after, the team clicked into place. Science on one side, company-building on the other. We backed them. That was in 2021, and we have backed them every round since.

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What kept us backing them, round after round, was straightforward: the evidence kept getting stronger. While the rest of the field chased qubit counts, QuantWare delivered quantum processors to real clients and made real revenue. With strategic foresight, they were already working on unlocking the scaling bottleneck for quantum computing: how to access thousands of qubits in a fridge at near 0 Kelvin.  

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They built VIO (Vertical Input Output), an open-architecture platform designed to enable processors at a scale the market had not yet managed to reach. More importantly, they sold it. They found customers and kept growing through every stage. Commercial discipline at this level of technical complexity is not common, and it is the first thing we look for.

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We participated in every subsequent round. The syndicate around the company grew stronger with each round, eventually including Invest-NL, InnovationQuarter, and the EIC, and the business kept pace with the capital raised.

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Robin and Riemer drove the process that led to this round. In May 2026, QuantWare closed a €152 million Series B, the largest private funding round ever raised by a dedicated quantum processor company, with Intel Capital, In-Q-Tel, and ETF Partners joining alongside existing backers. The company is moving to become the infrastructure provider for the global quantum hardware market, anchored by KiloFab, a dedicated fabrication facility being built in the Netherlands.

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Multi-stage investing means writing the first cheque before there is consensus, and continuing to back the team as the case develops. We will do the same for the next company that earns it.

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Performance is the only thing that compounds.

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FORWARD.one

Serious about performance.