The European Union’s Scaleup Europe Fund has made its inaugural investment in a UK-based company, Quantum Motion, leading a $160 million funding round, as reported by Bloomberg. This marks the largest single funding round for a European silicon-spin-qubit firm to date and the first major late-stage investment for the EU’s fund, which has been in the works for nearly two years by the European Investment Fund.
Quantum Motion, founded in London in 2017 by Professors John Morton and Simon Benjamin, falls outside the EU’s regulatory boundary post-Brexit. However, the Scaleup Europe Fund’s mandate, as outlined by the European Innovation Council, includes strategic technology areas like quantum, allowing for eligibility beyond strictly EU-based companies. Quantum Motion’s selection for funding is a clear operational sign of this wider perimeter.
Quantum Motion’s strategy involves building qubits using standard silicon-CMOS, a process already in use by the semiconductor industry, prioritizing long-term scalability over immediate performance. This is in contrast to many frontier-quantum systems that use custom processes difficult to produce at scale. Though Quantum Motion’s silicon-CMOS spin qubits mature more slowly, they can potentially be manufactured by any advanced foundry.
Recent achievements, such as delivering a full-stack silicon-CMOS quantum computer to the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre in 2025 and advancing to DARPA’s QBI Stage B in November 2025, have bolstered its technical case. This latest funding round doubles Quantum Motion’s total capital, indicating strong investor support for its approach against competing modalities, such as superconducting and trapped-ion systems.
The Scaleup Europe Fund is part of the EU’s response to the late-stage technology funding gap with the US, with the European Investment Fund’s €15bn fund-of-funds program supporting nearly 100 late-stage venture capital funds. Previous initiatives, like the European Tech Champions Initiative, facilitated large-scale funding for European tech growth, including nine unicorns.
The EU’s investment in Quantum Motion, rather than traditional AI-software ventures, signals its strategic focus. Despite achieving significant technical milestones, Quantum Motion has not yet demonstrated a commercial system at a large scale or the utility-scale fault tolerance that the EU’s funding appears to be backing. The timeline approved by DARPA points to the 2030s for such developments, with the next 18 to 24 months being crucial in demonstrating whether Quantum Motion can keep pace with more aggressive US-based quantum companies and if the EU’s commitment aligns with what has been raised by major US AI labs.