Planqc bets neutral atoms win quantum computing; €50M Series A, DLR and Airbus contracts

Planqc builds neutral-atom quantum computers — lasers trap and stabilise single atoms as qubits — and sells access via government contracts, a cloud service and industry software

Lasers-trapped neutral atoms are the fastest route to fault-tolerant quantum computers — scale past rivals' qubit counts and win with 'Made in Germany' machines

€50M Series A (Jul 2024); earlier €4.6M round; plus a €29M DLR contract

Founded in 2022 in Munich by scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and LMU Munich, including CEO Alexander Glätzle and CTO Sebastian Blatt, with MPQ director Immanuel Bloch as scientific anchor. It was the first spinout of Munich's Quantum Valley, and in 2022 it won a €29M tender to build a neutral-atom quantum computer for the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

In July 2024 Planqc closed a €50M Series A led by European family office CATRON Holding and Germany's DeepTech & Climate Fonds, with Bayern Kapital, the Max Planck Foundation, UVC and Speedinvest, plus a non-dilutive grant from the federal research ministry (BMBF). Around the same time it was commissioned by the German government to deploy a 1,000-qubit machine at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, and Bloch said the lab had demonstrated 1,200 neutral-atom qubits — on par with IBM's 1,121-qubit machine.

Still building. In September 2025 Planqc became lead contractor for two DLR Quantum Computing Initiative projects with TUM, ENGYS and Airbus, testing quantum algorithms for aircraft aerodynamics on its neutral-atom hardware, and it won the German Entrepreneur Award 2025 for its hardware-sales-plus-cloud business model.

Neutral atoms are a differentiation bet: atoms are identical by nature, so qubit quality and scale come from optics rather than fabrication, attacking the scaling problem other quantum platforms face

Planqc anchored demand early with government buyers such as DLR and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, funding development and legitimising the technology before it had a commercial product

The €50M Series A rode a European push: quantum VC funding in Europe ($781M) was more than triple North America's ($240M), plus national commitments like Germany's €3B quantum programme

The bet still rests on an unproven claim — 1,200 qubits demonstrated in the lab is not a fault-tolerant machine — so public milestones and contracts carry the valuation until the hardware is real

Spin out the physics you already master: Planqc turned atomic-clock know-how into qubits and lab milestones into paid government contracts before the product finished — early contracts buy time

As of September 2026 Planqc is still development-stage — no commercial fault-tolerant machine has shipped — but it holds an unusual pipeline of paid public-sector work: the 1,000-qubit system commissioned for the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, the 100-qubit DLR system, software collaborations with Airbus, ESA and Fraunhofer, and the DLR aviation consortium with TUM, ENGYS and Airbus. The bet now hinges on converting its 1,200-qubit lab record into an error-corrected, useful machine ahead of IBM-, Google- and IonQ-class competition.