Q-CTRL Raises US$290m Series C, Led by Salesforce Ventures

Q-CTRL has raised US$290 million (A$415 million) in a Series C private fundraise led by Salesforce Ventures. The Sydney-based quantum infrastructure software company announced the round on 12 November 2026. It described the raise as oversubscribed, said the round “saw two expansions to meet investor demand,” and called itself “the newest quantum-sector unicorn.” It did not publish a valuation.

Salesforce Ventures, in a note the same day, said it “first backed Q-CTRL in 2022 and is proud to lead its $290M Series C.” The two official texts agree on the amount and the lead. Neither gives a pre-money or post-money figure.

Salesforce Ventures is back for a second time

Q-CTRL said the round had “significant participation from Bullhound Capital and Affinity Partners,” alongside a wider syndicate. New investors named in the announcement are Affinity Partners, AMD Ventures, EDGE Group, MPower Partners, Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation and SPARX Asset Management. Returning investors are Alpha Edison, Alumni Ventures, Bullhound Capital, DCVC, In-Q-Tel, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Main Sequence, Ridgeline, Salesforce Ventures, Salus Ventures and Square Peg.

Michael J. Biercuk, Q-CTRL’s chief executive and founder, tied the syndicate to the company’s software-first pitch:

At Q-CTRL, one of our core values is to Be Real, and that means a continued drive to deliver true customer value from quantum technology through our unique focus on infrastructure software.

Robert Keith, a partner at Salesforce Ventures, struck the same note in the company announcement: “The hard problem in quantum is not building the machine, it is getting useful output from it.” In the Ventures note, he and Kevin Wu describe Q-CTRL’s product as AI-powered infrastructure software that is hardware-agnostic, with navigation as the present source of revenue and computing as the longer-term market. The firm also names Q-CTRL’s work with IBM on the computing side.

That software emphasis is the useful way to place the raise against other recent quantum news on TSN, from IBM’s plans for Nighthawk r3 to Horizon Quantum’s non-binding approach to Entropica Labs and the ORNL, IBM and AMD error-correction platform. Those stories are about machines, software stacks and lab partnerships. This one is about a funding round for the software layer that Q-CTRL says sits on top of other people’s hardware.

The Q-CTRL Series C is being spent on software and navigation

Q-CTRL said it will “double down on its software-first capabilities” and scale Ironstone Opal, its GPS-free quantum navigation system. The company says that product “is being deployed on commercial aircraft with Airbus, in autonomous platforms with Lockheed Martin, and on unmanned drones.” Those deployments are Q-CTRL’s own account. The announcement also says the firm’s software-ruggedization “enables its highly sensitive quantum sensors to perform in the field 100 times better than the best alternative.” That comparison is a company claim.

Salesforce Ventures repeats the 100-times figure as something “Q-CTRL reports,” and writes that in July 2026 Ironstone Opal became, in the firm’s words, “the first quantum navigation system to achieve safety-of-flight qualification under the aviation industry’s RTCA DO-160 standard.” Those milestones are investor descriptions of the company’s record, not independently tested results in either primary text.

Q-CTRL says it was founded in 2017 by Professor Biercuk and operates from offices in Sydney, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Huntsville, Berlin and Oxford. The announcement is a financing story for a software and navigation business, not a procurement award.

A unicorn label is not the same as a published valuation

Q-CTRL’s use of “unicorn” is a claim about how the company wants the round to be read. It is not a substitute for a stated valuation. Salesforce Ventures confirms the $290 million lead and the 2022 relationship; it does not fill in the missing price. That gap should stay a gap. A software-focused quantum raise can be large, oversubscribed and still leave the post-money figure unpublished.

The substance that is on the record is more specific. Both sources present the company as selling infrastructure software rather than a new quantum processor, and both put GPS-free navigation, rather than a lab-only computing milestone, at the centre of near-term work. That is a different bet from a hardware roadmap, and it is also a different bet from an error-correction collaboration between national labs and chipmakers. It does not, on the published texts, come with a customer-by-customer revenue split, a contract value for the Airbus or Lockheed Martin work, or an independent test of the “100 times better” claim.

The next useful disclosures are therefore ordinary ones for a late-stage private round: whether Q-CTRL later states a valuation, whether the navigation deployments move from “being deployed” to named in-service programmes, and whether the IBM software work shows up as a broader computing revenue line rather than a flagship demonstration. Until those arrive, the facts that can be stated without stretching are the amount, the lead investor, the software-first framing, and the company’s own unicorn label.

Sources

• Q-CTRL, “Q-CTRL Secures US$290 Million Series C Funding Led by Salesforce Ventures to Accelerate the Convergence of Quantum and AI,” 12 November 2026
• Salesforce Ventures, Robert Keith and Kevin Wu, “The Hard Part of Quantum Isn’t the Hardware — Our investment in Q-CTRL,” 12 November 2026

Related stories

• IBM Plans Nighthawk r3 and a 1,040-Qubit Linked System is the nearest recent hardware-roadmap counterpart to this software-focused raise.
• Horizon Quantum Signs Non-Binding LOI for Entropica Labs
• ORNL, IBM and AMD Launch Quantum Error Correction Platform