In May 2020, as the world grappled with pandemic lockdowns and venture capital retreated from all but the most proven business models, a small team of quantum physicists in Singapore secured S$2.6 million—roughly US$1.8 million—to solve a problem that barely existed yet.
Entropica Labs, spun out from the National University of Singapore's Centre for Quantum Technologies, had convinced a syndicate of deep-tech investors and family offices to back software for quantum computers that still couldn't reliably run for more than a few microseconds. The bet? That error correction—the unglamorous but essential plumbing of quantum computing—would become critical infrastructure as the field matured.
It was, by most measures, an act of faith.
The Money and the Believers
Elev8.vc, a Singapore venture firm with a taste for hard science, led the seed round. The rest of the cap table read like a survey of regional tech capital: SGInnovate (the government-backed deeptech investor), Wavemaker Partners, Japan's TIS Inc, Entrepreneur First, and the Lim Teck Lee Group—the family office of Razer co-founder Lim Kaling. V1 Capital, an early-stage arm of Vy Capital, joined as well.
Angels Charlie Songhurst and Claus Nehmzow participated. Kindrik Partners, a Singapore law firm, advised on the deal.
The round arrived two years after co-founders Tommaso Demarie and Ewan Munro formally launched Entropica in May 2018. Demarie—CEO, quantum information theorist, PhD from Macquarie University—had spent years contemplating the mathematical structures that might keep quantum bits from collapsing into noise. Munro, the CTO, carried a doctorate from CQT and a theoretical physicist's temperament. Joaquin Keller, recruited from France's Orange in December 2018, became the commercial voice as chief commercial officer.
Building Software for Hardware That Barely Worked
The capital, according to the company's announcement at the time, was earmarked for expanding the technical team, advancing proprietary software architectures, and securing access to a still-nascent collection of cloud quantum systems. Entropica was developing tools, algorithms, and frameworks designed to occupy the middle layer of quantum computing—between the finicky hardware and the applications that venture capitalists liked to fantasize about.
Think of it as middleware for machines that hadn't quite arrived.
Early on, the startup secured collaborations with IBM, Microsoft, and Rigetti Computing, integrating with the leading cloud quantum platforms of the moment. The technical focus was quantum error correction—arguably the thorniest infrastructure challenge facing the field. Quantum bits, or qubits, are notoriously fragile; environmental noise corrupts calculations in milliseconds. Without error correction, scaling quantum computers from dozens of qubits to the millions required for practical applications seemed implausible.
Entropica's eventual flagship product, Loom, would evolve into a QEC framework and compiler designed for fault-tolerant quantum computing. But in 2020, that was still a destination, not a product.
What Happened Next
The seed round proved more than adequate as a foundation. By November 2023, Entropica had closed a US$4.7 million Series A led by Italy's Liftt, with participation from Wavemaker Partners, SEEDS Capital (Enterprise Singapore's investment arm), CerraCap Ventures, SUTD Venture Holdings, and returning backer Elev8. A Series A extension of US$0.8 million from State Farm Ventures followed in September 2024. That August, the company secured a Startup SG Tech grant from Enterprise Singapore.
Partnerships with hardware providers started to materialize—perhaps more than the founders expected back in 2020. Atom Computing announced a strategic collaboration in June 2023. Xanadu, a photonic quantum computing firm, integrated Entropica's tools with PennyLane and Catalyst in December 2024. A real-time QEC testbed built with Quantum Machines debuted at Q2B Silicon Valley in December 2025. By early 2026, memorandums of understanding with France's Quobly and Japan's Yaqumo signaled system-level co-design work.
In November 2024, Chad Rigetti—former CEO and founder of Rigetti Computing, one of the early quantum hardware darlings—joined Entropica's board. A validation of sorts.
The Context That Mattered
Entropica's seed was one of several quantum software bets in the region that year, though not the largest. Singapore peer Horizon Quantum Computing expanded its own seed to S$4.5 million in June 2020. Across the Pacific, Zapata Computing raised a $38 million Series B in November, signaling that investors retained some appetite for the quantum software layer—even as the underlying hardware remained years, possibly decades, from true commercialization.
It was a curious moment. The pandemic had frozen much of venture capital, yet money still flowed toward problems that wouldn't pay off until the 2030s. Error correction software for quantum computers that couldn't yet run Shor's algorithm or simulate molecules with any reliability.
Maybe that's what deeptech investing always is: a wager that someone needs to build the pipes before the water arrives.
