Q.ANT raises €62M to advance computing with photonic processing

German photonic deep tech company Q.ANT has announced a €62 million Series A financing round to accelerate the commercialization of its energy-efficient photonic processors for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC). 

The round was co-led by Cherry Ventures, UVC Partners and imec.xpand with participation from additional deep tech investors, including L-Bank, Verve Ventures, Grazia Equity, EXF Alpha of Venionaire Capital, LEA Partners, Onsight Ventures, and TRUMPF, according to a media release.

Q.ANT has brought to maturity the world’s first commercial photonic processor for real-world AI and HPC workloads — executing complex AI operations much faster while saving significant amounts of energy, the company said. Built on Thin-Film Lithium Niobate (TFLN), the Q.ANT Native Processing Server integrates seamlessly into today’s data centers as a plug-in co-processor. 

Real-world tests promise up to 30 times energy efficiency, 50 times performance improvement, and the potential to increase data center capacity by 100 times — all without the need for complex active cooling systems, the media release said.  

“Q.ANT was founded with a bold vision: to redefine the way the world computes by using light instead of electricity,” said Dr. Michael Förtsch, founder and CEO of Q.ANT. “This investment proves that Europe has both the ambition and the capital to lead – and gives us the strong partners we need to pursue our mission and help shape the future of computing.”  

This funding will enable Q.ANT to scale production, advance development of next-generation photonic processors, grow its team across disciplines, and expand to the US to support a growing number of customer deployments, it said.  

“Q.ANT’s photonic chips stand to radically reduce data center operating costs while delivering the breakthrough performance demanded by next-generation AI and high-performance computing,” said Christian Meermann, Founding Partner at Cherry Ventures. “With early commercial momentum and a world-class team of deep tech experts, Q.ANT is uniquely positioned to redefine the trillion-dollar data center semiconductor landscape.”  

“What impressed us about Q.ANT was the clarity of its vision and its ability to consistently deliver on it,” said Andreas Unseld, General Partner at UVC Partners. “Q.ANT is not only pioneering a new computing architecture, but doing so in a way that addresses the urgent need for more sustainable AI infrastructure.” 

“Classical CMOS processors are approaching their physical and architectural limits – where further gains through parallelization and smaller structures yield only marginal improvements. In contrast, photonic computing represents a fundamentally new paradigm with immense, largely untapped scaling potential,” said Cyril Vancura, Partner at imec.xpand. “Q.ANT has solved the core challenges of this technology and is well positioned to define the future of high-performance computing.”