Q.ANT raises €62 M to ‘transform computing’ with photonic processing

17 Jul 2025

Largest Series A funding to drive rollout of photonic processors to meet AI demands.

Q.ANT, a pioneer in photonic processing, has announced a €62 million (USD 72 million) Series A financing round to accelerate the commercialization of its photonic processors specified for AI and high-performance computing. Q.ANT was founded by Michael Förtsch as a spin-off from Trumpf in 2018, developing independently light-based data processing.

The company states, “This investment ranks among Europe’s most significant deep tech funding rounds, laying the foundation for a fundamental shift in how AI is computed.”

The investment is co-led by Cherry Ventures, UVC Partners and imec.xpand with participation from additional deep tech investors, including L-Bank, Verve Ventures, Grazia Equity, EXF Alpha of Venionaire Capital, LEA Partners, Onsight Ventures, and Trumpf.

Q.ANT’s statement adds, “As AI infrastructure scales globally, traditional chip technology reaches its physical limits, performance stagnates, and electricity demand is reaching untenable levels. A report from the International Energy Agency estimates that by 2026, data center energy use is expected to surpass the entire annual electricity consumption of Japan.”

Data center integration

In the past five years, Q.ANT has brought to maturity what it calls the world’s first commercial photonic processor for real-world AI and HPC workloads. Built on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN), the Q.ANT Native Processing Server integrates seamlessly into today’s data centers as a plug-in co-processor. Real-world tests promise up to 30 times energy efficiency, 50 times performance improvement, and the potential to increase data center capacity by 100 times – all without the need for complex active cooling systems.

“Q.ANT was founded with a bold vision: to redefine the way the world computes by using light instead of electricity,” said Dr. Michael Förtsch, founder and CEO of Q.ANT. “This investment proves that Europe has both the ambition and the capital to lead – and gives us the strong partners we need to pursue our mission and help shape the future of computing.”

The funding will enable Q.ANT to scale production, advance development of next-generation photonic processors, grow its team across disciplines, and expand to the US to support a growing number of customer deployments.

The firm is also strengthening its advisory board with two semiconductor experts: Hermann Hauser, founder of ARM and Hermann Eul former member of the Infineon Management Board and former CVP & GM of Intel, whose combined expertise in semiconductor scaling, industrialization and global commercialization will be instrumental in Q.ANT’s next phase.

“Q.ANT’s photonic chips stand to radically reduce data center operating costs while delivering the breakthrough performance demanded by next-generation AI and high-performance computing,” said Christian Meermann, Founding Partner at Cherry Ventures. “The company is positioned to redefine the trillion-dollar data center semiconductor landscape. We’re proud to back them in building the future of computing.”

Andreas Unseld, General Partner at UVC Partners, added, “Q.ANT is not only pioneering a new computing architecture, but doing so in a way that addresses the urgent need for more sustainable AI infrastructure.”

“Classical CMOS processors are approaching their physical and architectural limits – where further gains through parallelization and smaller structures yield only marginal improvements,” said Cyril Vancura, Partner at imec.xpand. “In contrast, photonic computing represents a fundamentally new paradigm with immense, largely untapped scaling potential.”

Q.ANT says it is on a mission to redefine the future of AI infrastructure. By 2030, the company aims to make its photonic processing technology a foundational pillar of global AI systems.

Berthold Schmidt, CTO at Trumpf, said, “Deep Tech disruption demands courage, foresight and decisive action. Q.ANT set out to redefine the way we compute and we believed in their vision from day one. We backed Q.ANT’s mission with early investment, robust infrastructure, and technical support enabling Q.ANT to develop its breakthrough photonic chip architecture.