Oratomic raises $475 million Series B, triples its valuation to $5.4 billion in three months

TLDR

• Oratomic has raised $475 million in a Series B round, co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures, General Catalyst and Bezos Expeditions, taking total funding to $775 million.¹
• The round values the quantum computing startup at $5.4 billion, up from $1.5 billion just three months earlier at its Series A.²
• Dealroom reports it is the largest US Series B ever raised in quantum technologies, and that Khosla Ventures compared the bet to its early investment in OpenAI.²
• Oratomic builds fault-tolerant quantum computers from neutral atoms held in laser-based optical tweezers, work that grew out of Caltech research co-authored by its own founders.³

Oratomic, the Pasadena, California quantum computing startup, has raised $475 million in a Series B round co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures, General Catalyst and Bezos Expeditions, the company announced.¹ The new money brings Oratomic's total funding to $775 million and values it at $5.4 billion, nearly four times the $1.5 billion valuation it held at its Series A just three months earlier.² Oratomic says the capital will go toward growing its scientific and engineering team, expanding its Pasadena lab infrastructure, and building the systems needed to scale up its machines.¹

Dealroom calls it the largest US Series B ever raised in quantum technologies, surpassing every comparable round on record, and reports that Khosla Ventures likened the bet to its early investment in OpenAI.² That enthusiasm comes with a caveat: the piece also cites Gartner's view that the quantum computing market is overcrowded, with more than half of quantum startups projected to shut down by 2030 for lack of revenue, a reminder that the sector's funding boom and its commercial maturity remain far apart.²

The technology behind the round traces back to Caltech research co-authored by Oratomic's own founders. TIME reported in April that co-founder Dolev Bluvstein and colleague Robert Huang, formerly of Google Quantum AI, used an AI-driven tool called OpenEvolve, built on large language models including Gemini and Claude, to find an algorithm that needs just three atoms per qubit instead of the 100 to 1,000 atoms typically required, a roughly hundredfold reduction.³ Bluvstein said the AI tooling was essential to the breakthrough, while Caltech quantum computing pioneer John Preskill, also a co-author, cautioned that humans still had to direct the work by "asking the right questions and then guiding the AI toward answers that are useful and informative."³ Oratomic's approach departs from the superconducting circuits used by rivals like Google and IBM, instead suspending individual atoms in reconfigurable laser-based arrays, with a stated goal of a working, fault-tolerant machine by 2030.¹³

Why it matters: investors are now pricing quantum computing promises at record speed, with Oratomic's valuation nearly quadrupling in three months on the strength of research that itself relied on AI to get there, even as Gartner's own warning about mass shutdowns suggests the money is moving well ahead of any near-term revenue.