2023: the year Europe built the middle of the table

A European Series B cluster, not a single breakout

Pasqal, eleQtron and Qblox all raised in Europe during 2023, at sizes that sit in the tens of millions rather than the hundreds. None of them changed the global top five. Together they did something more useful: they established that neutral-atom hardware, ion-trap control and the electronics stack underneath both could each attract institutional money on their own merits, without being bundled into a national programme. Riverlane's later round belongs to the same pattern — software and control layers becoming financeable categories rather than line items inside a hardware raise.

For a reader comparing regions, this matters more than the annual total. A table with one very large US round and six medium European ones will always look lopsided, but the European rows are evidence of a broader supplier base. We therefore show both the sum and the count of disclosed rounds on the year table below, because a single number hides the structural change.

The one Chinese row that is not a startup round

China Telecom Quantum Group's 2023 entry is registered capital from a state parent, not a priced equity sale to outside investors. It is the largest single figure in that year's ledger and it is also the least comparable to a Series B. Treating it as equivalent to Pasqal's round would inflate the China total by roughly the size of the whole European cohort. It stays in the ledger because deleting it would hide how quantum communication infrastructure is actually funded in China, but it is classified on the government capital tracker rather than as a venture round.

Alongside it sit Origin Quantum and Boson Quantum, two genuinely private Chinese computing rounds reported in RMB at much smaller sizes. The contrast on one page is the point: Chinese quantum financing in 2023 was simultaneously the largest state-led number and some of the smallest disclosed venture numbers in the dataset. Any narrative that collapses those into one figure is wrong.

What the year did not tell us

Quantum Machines' growth round in the Middle East is the only priced row for that region in 2023, which makes the regional percentage essentially a statement about one company. We show the share anyway, with the count next to it, because quietly dropping low-sample regions would make the site look cleaner and less honest. Several rounds that year were also reported without valuations, so nothing on this page supports a claim about which company was worth more.

Our 2023 data is thinner than 2025 or 2026. That is a property of our source coverage, not proof that the industry was quieter. Treat this review as a description of what we could verify, and read the methodology column on disclosure bias before drawing a trend line across years.

Every 2023 financing in the current ledger

Computed on this build: 7 published financings dated 2023, 7 with a disclosed cash amount and 0 with none. Disclosed cash across those rows totals about $748M. The largest single row is China Telecom Quantum Group at $420M; 1 row is classified as policy instruments and 0 as public-market instruments. Programmes and letters of intent contribute zero to this sum.

The practical takeaway

The 2023 rows are the baseline against which the 2025 public-market wave becomes legible. When the totals jump two years later, most of the increase comes from instruments — IPOs, ATMs and offerings — that barely appear in 2023 at all. Comparing the two years as if they measure the same thing is the single most common mistake we see in secondary coverage of this data.