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Microsoft joins $130m round in Canadian computing firm Photonic
Photonic has raised CA$180 million (US$130 million) in the first close of its latest funding round led by Planet First Partners, with new investors including Royal Bank of Canada and TELUS.
Existing investors such as BCI and Microsoft also joined the round, bringing Photonic’s total funding to CA$375 million (US$271 million).
Photonic said the new funding will be used to advance product development, hire more staff, and strengthen partnerships.
The Vancouver-based company develops distributed quantum computing systems that use silicon-based qubits and photonic connectivity.
Evercore acted as the sole placement agent for the raise.
Photonic’s technology is aimed at scaling quantum computing using existing telecom infrastructure.
🔗 Source: Photonic
🧠 Food for thought
Implications, context, and why it matters.
Photonic’s distributed plan targets scaling, yet fault tolerance remains years out
- Photonic links silicon spin qubits (information stored in the spin of electrons in silicon) with photons over telecom fiber (standard optical-fiber networks), unlike monolithic processors (single-chip quantum processors) that hit scaling limits 1.
- Quantum Low-Density Parity-Check (QLDPC) codes (quantum error-correcting codes) use less overhead than surface codes (the dominant method that typically needs many physical qubits per logical qubit) 2. One analysis pegs up to 20x fewer qubits 2.
- The team reports 92% fidelity in heralded spin initialization (a prepare-and-confirm step that flags success) 2. Work remains on cryogenic operation at scale, higher fidelity, plus fast distributed operations across nodes 2. The roadmap targets fault-tolerant computing (able to detect and correct errors continuously so large programs run reliably) by 2028, though groups still see few-qubit demos 2.
Telecom and colocation eye early quantum networking pilots
- TELUS invested for secure telecom pilots as a Canadian telecommunications operator, while Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) sees financial risk modeling uses 1.
- Photonic sends telecom-wavelength photons over standard fiber without lossy wavelength conversion 1. Dark-fiber operators (companies that lease unused fiber strands in city networks) could host pilots 34. Colocation facilities (third-party data centers where companies rent space, power, and connectivity) could join too 34. Testbeds span 28 sites across the US plus Europe 5. Examples include the 18 km Brookhaven-Stony Brook link and the 50 km Boston-area network 34. Others include the Berkeley Lab UC Berkeley three-node network plus Purdue’s multi-laboratory setup 67.
