A Bengaluru startup with roots in semiconductor IP design announced Monday it has raised $10 million to join an increasingly crowded field: building quantum computers that don't require laboratory-grade cryogenic cooling. Quanfluence Private Limited, incubated at IIT Madras, is betting on photonics—light particles instead of superconducting circuits—to reach an early processor by 2027 and a 100-qubit prototype two years after that.
Chiratae Ventures led the round. Pi Ventures, which backed Quanfluence's $2 million seed last December, returned with Rainmatter by Zerodha. "Photonics is amongst the most credible routes to a machine that scales outside the lab," Venkatesh Peddi, managing director at Chiratae, said in the company's statement. Whether that credibility translates into working hardware is another question entirely.
The raise arrives as photonic quantum computing draws sovereign money across three continents. Venture funding into quantum computing startups reached $12.6 billion in 2025, McKinsey reported in April 2026, with projections placing the broader quantum market somewhere between $60 billion and $100 billion by 2035. Forecasts vary wildly depending on who's counting and what they include, but the direction of travel is clear: governments and corporations are placing serious bets that quantum machines will eventually do something useful.
Room Temperature, Real Problems
Photonic systems offer a seductive engineering proposition. Photons operate at room temperature. They travel through standard fiber-optic cables. No dilution refrigerators hovering near absolute zero, no exotic materials that demand cleanroom assembly. The trade-off, as Quanfluence CEO Sujoy Chakravarty acknowledged to Moneycontrol, is that deterministic two-qubit operations remain stubbornly difficult. "We are building a quantum computer in a new technology which is photonic," he said, adding that funding would go toward constructing that prototype machine. The phrasing was careful, as it tends to be when discussing technologies still being invented.
Quanfluence pursues what's known as a continuous-variable photonic architecture, combining custom photonic chips, control electronics, and software layers. The company already ships commercial products: a photonic Ising machine for optimization problems, quantum random-number generators, and single-photon detectors. All operate at room temperature. Moneycontrol reported the startup plans a four-qubit system in the near term before attempting the larger 2029 prototype.
Competitors in North America and Europe have moved faster, at least by qubit count. France's Quandela delivered Lucy, a 12-qubit photonic quantum computer, to the CEA TGCC supercomputing center last October for €8.5 million, co-funded by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking. The system was formally inaugurated in April 2026. Quandela's Belenos processor became available through OVHcloud's quantum platform the same month, and in June 2026, DARPA selected the French company for Stage A of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative.
PsiQuantum, the Silicon Valley photonics contender, secured up to $100 million in CHIPS Act R&D funding finalized in September to tackle high-temperature single-photon detectors and low-loss packaging—two of the more intractable manufacturing puzzles photonic systems face. Canada's Photonic Inc. closed more than $200 million in May at a $2 billion post-money valuation, drawing strategic investment from Microsoft, RBC, and TELUS. "Distributed architectures will be an important way to scale quantum technology… operate over today's fiber infrastructure," Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president at Microsoft Quantum, said when that round was announced.
Xanadu, another Canadian player, introduced Aurora—a modular networked photonic quantum computer—in January 2025 and went public via SPAC later that year. ORCA Computing in the UK has deployed photonic testbeds to the National Quantum Computing Centre and delivered systems to the Ministry of Defence. The list goes on, each company claiming a slightly different architectural edge.
Sovereign Strategies Harden
Governments have moved from exploratory spending to institutional commitment. India's National Quantum Mission allocated ₹6,003.65 crore (roughly $720 million) over 2023 to 2031. By April, the mission had extended support to 17 startups, according to Press Information Bureau updates. Four thematic hubs launched in September 2024: quantum computing at the Indian Institute of Science, communication at IIT Madras alongside the Centre for Development of Telematics, sensing at IIT Bombay, and materials research at IIT Delhi.
Security concerns are accelerating parallel investments. The United States issued an executive order in June requiring federal agencies to migrate high-value assets to post-quantum cryptography by the end of 2030 for key establishment protocols and by late 2031 for digital signatures, per Office of Management and Budget Memorandum M-26-15. NIST published finalized post-quantum cryptographic standards in August 2024. India's QNu Labs raised approximately ₹200 crore in a Series A1 round plus ₹150 crore in convertible debt in late September to scale quantum key distribution networks, aiming for a 2,000-kilometer QKD trunk linking Bengaluru and Delhi under the National Quantum Mission.
Market forecasts converge on scale even as they diverge on timing. Gartner pegged the quantum computing market at $2.3 billion by 2030 with a 26.7 percent compound annual growth rate starting this year, according to a September note. IDC sees worldwide quantum computing spending hitting $17.3 billion by 2029 at a 43 percent CAGR. McKinsey's April Quantum Technology Monitor, describing the market at a "commercial tipping point," estimated quantum computing could generate between $1.3 trillion and $2.7 trillion in economic value by 2035, with the quantum computing segment itself capturing $43 billion to $71 billion of a broader market.
BCG reported enterprise spending on quantum computing near $550 million last year in a June article, noting the market was maturing from pure research into application pilots. More than 300 organizations now participate in active quantum collaborations, McKinsey said. But realism tempers the enthusiasm. "True quantum computing is not ready for any production AI workload and will most likely not be for the rest of this decade," Chirag Dekate, a vice president analyst at Gartner, said in an August press release. Gartner predicts enterprise AI workloads at scale will not run on quantum hardware through 2028. Translation: don't cancel your GPU orders.
Credentials and Context
Quanfluence's founders bring relevant if not quantum-specific pedigrees. Chakravarty, Ravi Mehta, and Biman Chattopadhyay previously co-founded Silicon and Beyond, a SerDes IP company that Synopsys acquired in March 2018, according to IIT Madras Research Park profiles and Synopsys press materials. Aditi Vaidya serves as chief product officer. Academic co-founders include Prof. Anil Prabhakar at IIT Madras and Prof. Sandeep Goyal at IISER Mohali. The semiconductor design experience matters: building photonic quantum computers involves fabricating integrated photonic circuits, a domain adjacent to the team's prior work.
The startup holds grants from two Department of Telecommunications schemes, DCIS and TTDF, per a June compendium from Bharat Innovates. It signed a memorandum of understanding with SuperQ Quantum in Canada this past April to collaborate on architectures and go-to-market strategies. Company news entries show participation in India's TechSparks and ET Startup Awards last year. "Our goal… is to build a useful quantum computer. We chose photonics because we believe it gives us a path to scale," Chakravarty said in the company's October 7 press release.
Quandela's trajectory offers a glimpse of the integration path photonic systems might follow. Lucy now connects to CEA's Joliot-Curie supercomputer, with integration to the exascale Alice Recoque machine planned for later this year or next. Quandela reports that researchers across 30 countries—more than 1,700 of them—use its systems, per an AWS case study, tackling logistics optimization, pharmaceutical simulation, and quantum machine learning. The company published MerLin, a quantum machine-learning environment, slated for availability around mid-year.
NVIDIA's CUDA-Q platform and NVQLink interconnect technology, updated in September with CUDA-Q Logical orchestration layers, enable tight coupling between GPUs and quantum processing units across multiple vendors. ORCA Computing demonstrated hybrid photonic-GPU machine learning through CUDA-Q back in 2024. Supercomputing centers adopted NVQLink this year to reduce latency for real-time control and error correction, essential for any quantum system attempting to do meaningful work.
The Narrowing Window
Quanfluence's 2027 and 2029 milestones sit in an increasingly narrow timeline before DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative evaluates utility-scale feasibility by 2033. The startup's continuous-variable approach and room-temperature operation differentiate it from cryogenic superconducting systems, but those same choices put it in direct technical competition with Xanadu's similar architecture and PsiQuantum's silicon-photonics roadmap.
The Indian quantum ecosystem trails North America and Europe on deployed systems, though funding momentum is building. Beyond Quanfluence and QNu Labs, the broader National Quantum Mission framework funds research hubs and infrastructure. Whether Indian startups close the deployment gap or settle into roles as component and middleware suppliers depends on execution speed and integration with domestic high-performance computing centers—relationships that take years to establish.
Photonic quantum computing's supposed manufacturability advantage rests on leveraging existing semiconductor foundries. GlobalFoundries announced a quantum foundry initiative in May, and PsiQuantum's CHIPS award explicitly funds photonic manufacturing challenges. Quanfluence's plan to build chips and control electronics in-house mirrors strategies at Photonic Inc. and PsiQuantum. Vertical integration promises control but demands capital and expertise across multiple disciplines.
The 100-qubit target by 2029 would place Quanfluence roughly in the cohort of mid-scale systems Europe and North America plan to deploy between 2027 and 2030. Reaching that mark requires solving deterministic photon-photon interactions, a materials and engineering problem that consumed much of PsiQuantum's CHIPS R&D scope and remains central to scaling claims across the photonic sector. Quanfluence has three years. The clock, as they say in hardware, is already running.
