Europe – October 24, 2026 -- Orange Quantum Systems has secured €1.5M in pre-seed funding from QDNL Participations and the Cottonwood Technology Fund to build a full-scale system for automated qubit testing, a step the startup says is needed before quantum computers can scale.
Manual testing limits state-of-the-art labs to roughly 5-qubit chips
Testing quantum chips currently takes days and is too slow for industrial-scale production, according to the company. Co-founder and R&D Director Adriaan Rol says state-of-the-art labs can test chips of about 5 qubits. The process involves cooling a chip in a dilution refrigerator for several days, tuning it up, measuring the quantities of interest and warming it up for a day. Testing therefore takes weeks, and only a few chips per year may be tested.
Quantum chips are harder to test than classical chips. They must be cooled to cryogenic temperatures, where quantum effects appear, and brought to operating conditions through tuneup protocols before quality metrics such as coherence times can be measured.
Dedicated test equipment replaces full quantum computers as the business case
Chips have previously been tested by building a full quantum computer, which Rol calls inefficient. In his words, the real business case is dedicated test equipment. Companies are already building inefficient test solutions in-house, he says.
Orange Quantum Systems targets two customer priorities: throughput, and feedback to design and fabrication teams on qubit quality. Its systems are installed on-site and integrated into the development process. Engineers use the statistics to prevent crosstalk, increase coherence times and improve yield.
Superconducting qubits come first, with silicon spin qubits next
The company is starting with superconducting qubits, the most established hardware platform. It plans to expand to other solid-state qubits such as silicon spin qubits. Calibration and test protocols and frequency bands differ across architectures (microwave versus baseband), but the underlying physics stays the same, Rol says.
Early academic customers and an EIC Accelerator award back the build-out
The founders are Garrelt Alberts, Adriaan Rol, Thorsten Last, Kelvin Loh and Amber Van Hauwermeiren. Alberts previously led quantum engineering at QuTech, a Dutch quantum computing research institute. The team worked on Quantum Inspire, which the source describes as Europe's first quantum computer. It decided against becoming a full-stack quantum computing company because the technology is not mature enough.
Orange Quantum Systems won paying customers early by working with nearby academic labs. Rol says the pre-seed round and the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator will fund development of the full-scale system.