62 million for Q.ant: Stuttgart startup wants to solve AI's energy problems with Cherry and UVC

The startup aims to solve the energy problems of the artificial intelligence era with photonic chips. The fresh capital will be used, among other things, to expand its team.

It's all about speed – in every sense: The Stuttgart-based startup Q.ant has raised €62 million in a Series A financing round to accelerate its photonic processors to market. The financing round is considered the largest European investment round in the field of photonic computing ever.

The technology could be a solution to the growing energy problems of artificial intelligence. While conventional chips operate with electrons, Q.ant processors use light for data processing. The company promises up to 30 times greater energy efficiency and 50 times better performance.

In short, this could make computers much, much faster. At the same time, the capacity of data centers is expected to increase 100-fold.

This is necessary because experts fear that if we continue making such significant progress in AI, there may eventually be insufficient electricity. Traditional chip technology is reaching its physical limits. The International Energy Agency predicts that the energy consumption of data centers could exceed Japan's entire annual electricity consumption by 2026. Simply making chips smaller won't work—at some point, they won't be any smaller. Q.ant solves this problem with a new approach: computing with light instead of electricity.

The financing round was led by Cherry Ventures , UVC Partners, and imec.xpand. Other investors include L-Bank, Verve Ventures, Grazia Equity, EXF Alpha of Venionaire Capital, LEA Partners, Onsight Ventures, and the mechanical engineering group Trumpf, from which Q.ant emerged as a spin-off in 2018. Following the financing round, Trumpf holds only around one-fifth of the shares but remains the largest single shareholder.

The company's growth now has to move quickly, as Q.ant is competing against well-funded competitors such as the American and Canadian unicorns Psiquantum and Xanadu. After all, Q.ant has brought its product to market in just five years.

Q.ant, according to the company, intends to use the fresh capital to scale processor production, grow the team, and expand into the US and Asia.

In Germany, the Aachen-based startup Black Semiconductor is also working on a solution to the problem of the increasing demand for computing power: The founders from RWTH Aachen University have developed semiconductors based on the integration of graphene and photonics.

Graphene is carbon—but super-ultra-thin, just one atom thick. This could be used to connect multiple chips together, which could also solve the problem that chips simply cannot be made any smaller at some point. Black Semiconductor secured €254.4 million in funding in June 2024.