Two post-90s entrepreneurs from Fudan University have raised 1 billion yuan in funding to compete head-to-head with leading quantum technology giants.

Two Fudan University alumni are pushing a company founded less than a year ago onto the global quantum computing competition arena.

Exclusive information from ChinaVenture shows that Taiyi Quantum, a neutral-atom quantum computing enterprise, has completed a new round of financing. Huakong, an existing shareholder, led the investment, with participation from investors including Jinqiu Fund, Chengdu High-Tech Zone Vision Fund, Yunbai Capital, Lingang Frontier Investment, Hongruida Investment, Ningbo Huihao, and continued capital increase from old shareholders such as Hengxu Capital, Boyuan Capital, Yaru Capital, and Gaomai Capital.

Since its establishment in January 2026, Taiyi Quantum has raised a total of over 1 billion yuan in cumulative financing, less than four months after its previous 300 million yuan Pre-A round.

In the quantum computing industry, where technologies are highly cutting-edge and no clear valuation anchor has been formed yet, Taiyi Quantum is one of the neutral-atom enterprises with the strongest fundraising appeal in China. It is the first startup in this domestic track to publicly announce that its cumulative financing has exceeded 1 billion yuan. After this round, the company's valuation has reached the unicorn level.

Existing shareholders have the most say in whether a company can deliver on its promises. Huakong, the lead investor of this round, was already on the shareholder list for the Pre-A round in June. This Tsinghua-originated fund founded in 2007 has been very active in making investments in cutting-edge technology fields such as AI, quantum computing, and embodied intelligence recently.

This round of financing features distinct industrial attributes, with investors covering sectors including AI and computing power, electronic information, automotive and new energy, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, and more. This reflects that Taiyi Quantum has started to integrate its financing planning with future computing power synergy and application scenarios.

Apart from its efficient financing rhythm, Taiyi Quantum has gathered a team of nearly 100 people in the past few months, completed the whole machine integration of its first prototype in about six months, and pushed forward the R&D of real-time control systems and quantum compilers.

In this cutting-edge industry that is used to talking about long-term visions, the two post-90s Fudan alumni are trying to take practical actions to accumulate chips for participating in the next stage of competition through organizational and engineering progress.

From the "Arms Race" of Physical Qubits to a New Consensus on Fault Tolerance

In the past few years, the global consensus on quantum development has shifted, and neutral-atom quantum computing has gained rapid momentum thanks to its scalability potential, with enterprises including Atom Computing, QuEra, and Pasqal successively advancing system R&D. In March this year, Google, which has long focused on the superconducting qubit route, also announced the establishment of a new neutral-atom research team, to develop both technical routes in parallel.

Taiyi Quantum is exactly one of these new rising forces in the neutral-atom track. Founded in January 2026, the company's founder and CEO Fang Zhenghao has nearly 15 years of experience in cutting-edge technology investment and industrial practice, having invested in and incubated more than 100 technology enterprises. Its founder and CTO Liu Hongbin once served as the chief architect of Microsoft Quantum, with full-chain R&D experience covering quantum algorithms, quantum error correction, system architecture, and whole-machine engineering.

No matter which technical route is chosen, a more fundamental decision has to be made first.

In the past few years, the quantum computing industry has experienced an arms race focused on the number of physical qubits, growing from dozens, hundreds, to thousands and even larger arrays. After that, the global quantum industry has formed a new consensus: for quantum computing to truly enter enterprise-level applications, the difficulty is no longer just "how many physical qubits can be manufactured". Since physical qubits are prone to errors, tiny errors will accumulate as operations proceed, which may eventually make the results meaningless.

The focus of quantum computing competition has gradually shifted from "who has more physical qubits" to "who can take the lead in building a truly operable logical qubit system".

In September this year, Matthias Troyer, head of Microsoft Quantum and computational physicist, Chetan Nayak, head of Microsoft Quantum Hardware and Systems Engineering, and John Martinis, 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate from Qolab, further proposed the definition of "scalable logical qubit": it can maintain long-time computation through repeated error correction, support fault-tolerant general operations, feature low-latency real-time decoding and feedback, and can be scaled to hundreds or thousands of qubits according to application requirements.

This definition examines reliability, scale, computing capability and performance as a whole. Demonstrating a logical qubit is only the starting point; how long it can run, what operations it supports, and how many physical resources it requires also determine its practical value. Specific applications have different requirements for error rate and computation depth, so the commercialization threshold cannot be generalized with a single number.

As a result, the arms race has not ended, but extended from quantity to system capability. Technical routes of overseas enterprises still differ, but fault-tolerant quantum computers are widely recognized as the next competitive node in global quantum computing.

The ytterbium atom route that Taiyi Quantum chose from the very beginning is a pragmatic reverse derivation under this framework: it first sets the fault tolerance target, then considers the error correction scheme, control architecture and physical system. The company has concentrated its resources on general-purpose fault-tolerant computing since its inception. In Fang Zhenghao's view, the most important decision Taiyi Quantum made at the beginning of its establishment was not to manufacture as many physical qubits as possible, but to determine the future fault-tolerant computing architecture, and organize technical routes, talents and capital investment around this end goal.

Compared with the traditional path that relies on university laboratories, Taiyi Quantum has organized interdisciplinary R&D in the form of a corporate entity from the very start, putting engineering and productization on the same schedule. According to Fang Zhenghao, the real barrier for deep tech startups does not only come from the technical route itself, but also from continuously gathering world-class talents, long-term capital and industrial resources around the correct technical end goal, and enabling these elements to promote each other.

Less than a year after its establishment, Taiyi Quantum has demonstrated highly efficient talent organization. According to disclosed information, the company has recruited a team of nearly 100 people, whose members come from universities including MIT, University of Cambridge, University of Pennsylvania, LMU Munich, Tsinghua University and Peking University, scientific research institutions such as JILA and CQT, as well as enterprises including Microsoft and Zurich Instruments, covering physics, optics, control, software and algorithms.

It is worth noting that Taiyi Quantum has attracted foreign scientific research and engineering personnel. Many members who have received job offers from enterprises such as QuEra and Oratomic still chose to join Taiyi Quantum.

Behind its talent appeal lies a full-stack self-development plan targeting global industry giants: the company aims to master key links ranging from physical hardware, measurement and control, to compilation, error correction and algorithm implementation.

The neutral-atom quantum computing system involves multiple complex subsystems including vacuum, laser, optics, atom manipulation, imaging, measurement and control, real-time control and software. Full-stack R&D means no weak links in any single point, which can form higher barriers, improve system R&D efficiency, and create conditions for long-term performance optimization, but the difficulty of system implementation has also multiplied.

At present, full-stack R&D is a common choice for leading overseas companies, and leading enterprises such as Google and Microsoft have provided important references. Behind the error correction progress of Willow, chip design and manufacturing, quantum operation, calibration and real-time decoding need to be jointly optimized, and finally tested by the logical error rate. Whether different links can share problems and iterate quickly directly affects the overall performance.

However, full-stack independent R&D is relatively rare in China's quantum industry, and Taiyi Quantum is probably one of the few neutral-atom enterprises in China that conduct full-stack independent R&D of all core technologies. CTO Liu Hongbin's philosophy is to realize such system synergy within the company, and full-stack independent R&D is expected to achieve the highest R&D efficiency and overall performance.

Supply chain maturity is also an important challenge. Although industries such as precision manufacturing and optoelectronics have laid a good foundation, some key components and system interfaces for fault-tolerant quantum computing still need continuous optimization. Through full-stack R&D and system integration, Taiyi Quantum enables its physics, control and software teams to collaborate around a unified architecture.

Therefore, full-stack development is not only a technical choice, but also an organizational choice. It requires recruiting talents in multiple scarce fields at the same time, turning interdisciplinary communication into a daily engineering process, and exchanging higher upfront investment for R&D autonomy and iteration efficiency.

Betting on Full-stack R&D, Starting to Deliver Results

This full-stack plan has already presented specific engineering results. Recently, Taiyi Quantum disclosed three progress updates in whole-machine integration, real-time control and quantum compiler, corresponding to physical platform, control feedback and software capability respectively.

On the one hand, it boasts high engineering efficiency; on the other hand, it is inseparable from the mature experience of its CTO — Liu Hongbin has previously led teams to realize multiple demonstrations and engineering implementations of fault-tolerant quantum computing systems, with experience in system-level design, integration and delivery for fault-tolerant computing.

Taiyi Quantum completed the whole-machine integration of its first prototype in about six months, connecting modules including vacuum, laser, optics, atom manipulation, imaging and measurement and control into a unified system, and entering the joint debugging and optimization stage.

In terms of control systems, Taiyi Quantum has pushed the real-time control latency of its system to the order of 10 microseconds. A fault-tolerant system needs to receive measurement results in a timely manner, identify errors and determine subsequent operations, which requires close collaboration between classical computing and quantum hardware. Cutting-edge players such as Quantinuum and Atom Computing are strengthening their real-time control capabilities oriented to error correction, and NVIDIA is also promoting microsecond-level real-time connections between GPUs and quantum processors.

Taiyi Quantum has reduced its real-time control latency to the 10-microsecond level, which means it has initially opened the closed loop from camera input, data processing to atom rearrangement, and promoted the collaboration of FPGA, GPU and quantum hardware.

At the software level, Taiyi Quantum announced in September that it open-sourced its quantum compiler LUOSHU, which carries out compilation optimization for neutral-atom movement, dynamic connection and entanglement gate scheduling.

At present, there are roughly three routes for global quantum software. The first route is led by hardware vendors, who build ecosystems through their own SDKs, cloud platforms and compilers; the second route pursues cross-hardware abstraction, enabling code to migrate between different QPUs and simulators; the third route builds solvers driven by industry-specific problems, where vertical companies in sectors such as chemistry and finance compete.

Industry giants are also actively making layouts in this layer. At present, IBM's Qiskit, Google's Cirq, and NVIDIA's CUDA-Q are all building open quantum software ecosystems that connect developers, algorithms and underlying hardware.

The three progress updates eventually need to be integrated into a complete system. At present, Taiyi Quantum is promoting the system-level integration of its physical platform, real-time control and quantum compilation software, striving to form an engineering system with automatic error correction capabilities by the end of the year.

On the other hand, Taiyi Quantum is actively exploring landing scenarios. On the one hand, the growing demand for AI has brought widespread concerns about insufficient computing power; on the other hand, quantum computing can be applied in vertical industries. According to the company, Taiyi Quantum has currently carried out cooperation with more than ten clients from industries including nuclear industry, energy and chemical engineering, new energy and new materials, biomedicine and finance, centering on real scenario problems to accelerate the industrialization of quantum computing.

Fang Zhenghao believes that the industrialization of quantum computing requires the joint promotion of technological breakthroughs and strong client demand. On the one hand, the company attaches importance to the actual revenue generated from scientific research and industrial cooperation at this stage; more importantly, it verifies demands, accumulates industry experience and builds long-term client relationships through real scenarios, so as to lay a solid commercial foundation in advance for the large-scale application of fault-tolerant quantum computing in the future.

But it is undeniable that as a cutting-edge industry, quantum computing has not yet converged on its technical routes, and there are also divergences in its commercialization timeline. For the realization of quantum computing, conservatives believe it is still far away, while optimists believe it will be achieved within five to ten years.

For example, at the beginning of 2025, Jensen Huang's expectation for the distance between quantum technology and practical application was 20 years, but less than half a year later, he changed his statement that quantum computing is ushering in an "inflection point", and will be able to solve some "interesting global problems" in the next few years. Accordingly, NVIDIA has made active layouts in recent years, invested in leading quantum companies such as Quantinuum and PsiQuantum, and released open-source quantum computing models and CUDA-Q, trying to become the "operating system" supplier in the quantum computing era.

The phenomenon that the capital cycle precedes the industrial cycle also exists. For example, two quantum computing enterprises overseas have been listed on US stock markets respectively. In June this year, ion-trap quantum computing company Quantinuum was listed on NASDAQ with a market value of over 15 billion US dollars, making it the largest IPO in the history of quantum computing. In August this year, French neutral-atom quantum computing company Pasqal was also officially listed on NASDAQ through SPAC.

Another undeniable point is that the domestic quantum computing startup ecosystem is indeed the result of the combined effect of policies, technological progress and capital breakthroughs, with a strong "strategic priority" attribute. Major countries are continuously increasing investment in the quantum field through policies and capital.

According to CVSource data from ChinaVenture, the number of investments in China's quantum technology sector in 2025 has tripled compared with 2024. According to investors, the valuation of quantum computing companies now "doubles every few months". The key turning point is inseparable from the 15th Five-Year Plan, and continuous technological progress has also provided considerable impetus.

Quantum computing has higher technical barriers and rarer corresponding talents, and the number of teams with real technical capabilities is limited. Even so, conservative estimates show that more than 20 neutral-atom startups have been established in the past year, with more diversified backgrounds, including teams from universities, returnee talents, engineering professionals and so on.

Taiyi Quantum is one of the particularly noteworthy samples. The company is a firm optimist. According to Fang Zhenghao's expectation, the commercial application of large-scale quantum computing is expected to be realized in the next five years, and will empower the accelerated development of artificial intelligence (Quantum for AI).

All this explains why Taiyi Quantum chose a more concentrated and even slightly aggressive investment approach: targeting global industry giants, building a team of nearly 100 people, promoting full-stack independent R&D of core technologies, and prioritizing resources for general-purpose fault-tolerant computing. By exploring scenarios such as chemical reaction, material simulation and energy scheduling, it stands at a sufficiently cutting-edge position to understand in advance what tasks future quantum computing can actually accomplish.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "ChinaVenture", written by Cao Weiyu, and published by 36Kr with authorization.