The Netherlands lags behind in funding its quantum companies

The Netherlands ranks second in the world for quantum science, but lags behind in commercialisation and scale-up. Peer countries actively support their quantum industries through large investments and government procurement, while the Netherlands primarily supports research, infrastructure and early-stage innovation. To date, only one of the 29 Dutch quantum start-ups is in the global top 20 (QuantWare; see Exhibit 3). The recently announced national strategy has good intentions, but lacks allocation of funds to address this urgent gap [1].

A comparison of public investment in the ten largest quantum companies in five countries shows a large gap. Adding up public grants, investments and government contracts, the Dutch government has given its top ten companies €50 million on disclosed figures, or up to €81 million including an estimate for undisclosed public investments. None of it comes through a government contract. Germany’s support for its ten companies totals €163–211 million and the UK’s €264–309 million. France provides €160–329 million, rising to €449 million if announced amounts are also counted. The US provides €737–775 million, which its announced commitments could lift to about €1.6 billion. Each of the four other countries therefore spends three to fifteen times as much as the Netherlands.

The consequences show in the size and growth of the companies. QuantWare is the only Dutch company among the world’s 20 best-funded quantum companies, in 17th place, and it got there with a single round: its €152 million Series B in May 2026. IQM has raised three and a half times as much (Exhibit 3). The outcomes of international tenders show the consequences too. Finland’s IQM, building on successive orders from its national research centre VTT, supplied two of the EuroHPC quantum computers, installed in Ostrava, Czechia (VLQ, September 2025) and Munich, Germany (Euro-Q-Exa, February 2026) [2, 3]. Twente’s QuiX Quantum did win a government contract, but in Germany: €14 million from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) for photonic quantum computers. No Dutch company has yet supplied a complete EuroHPC quantum computer, and none of the eleven companies DARPA moved to Stage B of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative in November 2025 is Dutch [4].

Without similar support at home, Dutch companies start at a disadvantage. As in other countries, Dutch policy should focus not only on competitive science, technology and innovation policy, but also on industrial policy, through direct support and incentives for Dutch companies as they scale. That gives them a better chance of keeping up in global competition, and keeps the Netherlands out of the trap of seeing its technological lead commercialised elsewhere.

01The Netherlands has world-class quantum capabilities

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Critical Technology Tracker places TU Delft first in the world for high-impact research in quantum computing, based on the number of highly cited scientific papers [5], and according to QDNL’s State of Quantum 2025, the Netherlands ranks second worldwide in the science of quantum computing, sensing and communication [6]. In Delft, that research has produced a group of companies supplying much of the technology stack of a quantum computer, and QuTech, the research institute of TU Delft (formerly also of TNO), founded in 2013, has helped bring that work out of the lab. QDNL, funded with €615 million by the National Growth Fund, provides three instruments that are directly relevant for companies. First, it develops cleanrooms and shared facilities at five hubs, in Delft, Leiden, Twente, Amsterdam and Eindhoven, that individual start-ups cannot afford on their own [7]. Second, it funds small-scale joint development projects with companies, such as the compact cryostat developed by Leiden Cryogenics and Orange Quantum Systems, and pre-competitive public-private consortia [8]. Third, it has set up an early-stage fund, QDNL Participations (now Ground State Ventures), that invests in the youngest start-ups emerging from university research [9, 10].

From the strong Dutch research base, companies have emerged that cover almost every layer of the quantum computer, and more; Exhibit 1 shows where they are and what they supply. QuantWare makes superconducting processors. Groove Quantum develops germanium spin qubits. Around them, Qblox supplies the control electronics, Delft Circuits makes the cabling, and Orange Quantum Systems builds automated test equipment (ATE) for quantum chips. In Twente, QuiX Quantum builds photonic processors. QphoX and Falqon Systems (formerly Q*Bird) work on quantum networks [11, 12], while QT Sense and QDI Systems, both in Groningen, extend the industry into sensing and imaging [13, 14]. Two examples of younger companies outside our funding comparison are Delft Networks and QuantaMap. Delft Networks, spun out of QuTech in 2024, is building deployment-ready, full-stack quantum networks based on entanglement [15]. QuantaMap, a Leiden University spin-off, develops metrology and diagnostic tools for quantum chips [16].

QDNL counted 29 quantum start-ups employing 735 people in 2025 [6]. By our estimate, that workforce has grown to around 830 people in 2026, about 525 of them at hardware start-ups in Delft. Private investment in these firms rose from €10 million in 2019 to €160 million in 2025 [6]; the ten companies in our comparison have raised €329 million to date. The National Growth Fund’s €615 million award to the QDNL programme helped pay for the research and facilities behind this industry [18].

More companies and more jobs show that the ecosystem is growing. What makes it world-class is the quality of the technology these companies deliver. Single Quantum, founded in Delft in 2012, was the first European company to commercialise superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs); by 2020 more than 80 laboratories and companies worldwide were already using them [19]. Leiden Cryogenics, a maker of dilution refrigerators, has built a compact prototype under the QDNL-funded Quper project that cools below 25 millikelvin yet returns to room temperature in under 24 hours [8]. Falqon Systems, a TU Delft spin-off, describes itself as the world’s only commercial provider of measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD); it secures communications at the Port of Rotterdam and deployed the first cross-border MDI-QKD link, between Belgium and Luxembourg [20].

Leading quantum companies and laboratories abroad already buy Dutch components. Qblox reported more than 100 customers for its control electronics in 2024 [21]. Automated test equipment from Orange Quantum Systems is used by IQM, Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Quantum Testbed and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and Rigetti joined its partner programme in April 2026 [22]. In March 2026 QphoX launched a commercial quantum transducer, which converts quantum signals between microwave and optical frequencies so that quantum computers can be linked over ordinary optical fibre. IBM will be the first company to work with it, to connect its superconducting qubits [23]. Delft Circuits says its flexible cryogenic cabling offers eight times the channel density of coaxial cable at the same price [24].

The companies are also planning for much larger machines. In January 2026 QuantWare presented VIO-40K, a chiplet architecture for processors with 10,000 qubits. It is building KiloFab, a production facility in Delft intended to raise its manufacturing capacity twentyfold, with the first VIO-40K devices due to ship to customers in 2028 [25]. Many of these firms specialise in one part of a machine. Together, they give the Netherlands a supplier base that can build systems as well as sell components abroad.

There is no government procurement programme in the Netherlands, and further direct support and investment in companies is left to Invest-NL, RVO, the regional development agencies (ROMs) and the European EIC. The ROMs help at the start, RVO provides innovation credit and grants, Invest-NL invests the larger tickets, and the European EIC combines grants and equity in one instrument that is also open to companies from other European countries. Of the disclosed Dutch public money for the ten companies in our comparison, about €43 million comes from Invest-NL and the ROMs and about €7 million from grants by QDNL, RVO and the provinces. There are none of the large grants or procurement contracts that other countries do give their companies.

The real financing gap opens at Series B and later, when a hardware company needs tens of millions of euros per round, sometimes more than a hundred million. QuantWare’s Series B alone was €152 million. When raising that capital, having public customers gives confidence to international partners and investors.

02Dutch companies receive significantly less financial support than international competitors

In February 2026 the Netherlands Court of Audit (Algemene Rekenkamer), in a review of the government’s quantum policy, confirmed that the National Growth Fund’s €615 million QDNL programme, the main public programme for Dutch quantum, ends in 2028 without a concrete perspective for continuation [26]. In addition, no budget has yet been earmarked for the recently announced national quantum strategy [1], nor for the quantum proposals in the report on future prosperity that former ASML chief executive Peter Wennink presented to the cabinet in December 2025. The National Technology Strategy was initially given no budget of its own, relying instead on existing research and innovation funds [27]. The QDNL programme aims to raise private investment in start-ups and scale-ups from about €100 million in 2024 to about €750 million a year by its end. Experts interviewed by the Court warned that, without a stable long-term strategy, there is a risk that companies will leave for abroad [26].

The national quantum strategy, presented on 5 October 2026, aims for Dutch leadership in quantum by 2035, yet it puts no price on that goal. Nine ministries wrote it, the Ministry of Finance among them, and its actions have to fit within their existing budgets. The strategy also states that if sufficient funds cannot be found, “the ambitions will be adjusted” [28]. In other words, the government already expects to scale back if Finance does not provide the money. That is a weak signal to send to the investors and foreign customers Dutch companies are trying to win, at a time when peer governments are signing contracts with their own companies. An analysis by Het Financieele Dagblad, published in the context of the Wennink report, estimated that taking Dutch quantum from prototypes to industrial scale needs at least €9.4 billion of public and private investment. Dutch firms making chip components, cryogenic systems, cabling and test equipment risk being bought by US companies, several of them listed and able to pay with stock, if growth capital is not available in Europe [29].

Strong technology alone does not make a company grow. To hire engineers, expand production and deliver to customers, a hardware start-up needs capital, and this is where Dutch companies fall behind. The ten Dutch companies in this analysis have raised €329 million in equity, grants and loans, EU support included. More than half of that, €187 million, belongs to a single company: QuantWare, after its $178 million (about €152 million) Series B in May 2026. The other nine have raised about €142 million between them.

The median Dutch company among the ten has raised €16 million, compared with €37 million in France, €43 million in Germany and €48 million in the UK. These are cumulative amounts raised, not the size of a typical funding round. Excluding QuantWare’s €152 million Series B barely changes the median, which stays at about €16 million, because QuantWare remains the largest of the ten either way. The average, however, falls by almost half, from €32.9 million to €17.7 million per company. QuantWare’s success is encouraging, but one large round cannot finance the rest of the Dutch supplier base.

Dutch companies also do not yet have the scale of their peers abroad. Exhibit 3 ranks the world’s quantum companies by the capital they have raised, stock-market listings included. QuantWare, the largest Dutch company, comes 17th and is the only Dutch company in the top 20. Outside the US it ranks ninth, behind IQM, Pasqal, Origin Quantum, Xanadu, Oxford Quantum Circuits, Photonic, Quantum Machines and Quantum Motion. Without that capital, Dutch suppliers cannot build the production capacity and complete systems that larger customers ask for. The government has done little to push even its largest companies to the next scale: QuantWare has €28 million of disclosed Dutch public money, 15% of what it raised, and like the other nine it has no order from its own government.

The core of our analysis is the comparison of public support to the ten best-funded companies in the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, France and the US.

We count home-government equity investments, grants and loans as public funding, whether it comes from state investors such as Invest-NL, Bpifrance and the British Business Bank or from grant agencies and regional funds. Government orders are counted apart: they pay a company to build or develop something. Research and shared-facility budgets sit outside both. Every figure is an amount that a government or agency has awarded, invested or committed to a named company. Exhibit 4 sets public funding and procurement beside the capital each country’s ten companies have raised.

The Dutch government has disclosed €50 million in funding for its ten companies. France has disclosed €96 million, Germany €134 million, the UK €232 million and the US €356 million. The Dutch route is also narrow. Dutch public money reaches companies mainly through one channel: Invest-NL’s tickets in private rounds account for €43 million of the disclosed Dutch flows, and grants from QDNL, RVO and the provinces add about €7 million. Three companies, QuantWare, Qblox and QuiX Quantum, receive most of it.

Public investors often announce that they joined a round without publishing their contribution. Including those investments at the top of our estimates takes the Dutch total to up to €81 million. That is still below every peer’s disclosed amount.

Orders make the contrast sharper. The other four countries combine investment and grants with procurement: each also buys from its own companies. We found no published Dutch government contracts with these ten firms; in Exhibit 4 the Netherlands is the only country without a procurement bar. Domestic contracts total €29 million in Germany, €32 million in the UK, €64 million in France and €382 million in the US. France and the US have also announced further orders that are not yet contracted. The second phase of PROQCIMA offers up to €30 million to each of the four French companies still in the programme [42], after Pasqal left it in September 2026 [43]. DARPA has selected IonQ, Atom Computing, IBM, Diraq, Microsoft and PsiQuantum for Stage C of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative [44]. This stage carries a potential funding ceiling of $300 million per participant, subject to conditions; it is not a guaranteed award [45]. Germany has also awarded a €14 million contract to the Dutch company QuiX. A foreign government is already paying for Dutch quantum hardware.

Exhibit 5 compares the countries in three ways that do not depend on the size of the market. As a share of what the companies raised, Dutch public funding is not unusually low: 15–25%, against 24–28% in the UK, 9–25% in France and 26–36% in Germany. The gap lies in scale and in orders: the median Dutch company is the smallest of the five countries, and none of the ten Dutch companies has a contract from its own government, against five each in Germany and France, eight in the UK and nine in the US.

The US public share in Exhibit 5 looks small, but in euros the US government backs its companies more than any other country in this comparison: about €775 million of public funding and procurement combined, more than nine times the Dutch upper estimate. The share is small only because the ten US companies raise so much: €14.6 billion, 44 times as much as the ten Dutch companies.

03Three examples: Dutch companies and their better-funded foreign peers

Dutch companies are not short of competitive technology. Exhibit 6 sets three of them beside foreign peers with similar technology: each peer has raised three to 76 times as much capital and gets more support from its own government.

Groove and Quobly: strong Dutch results, a tenth of the money

Groove’s germanium array operates 18 qubits with a median single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.9% [51]. Quobly reports gates and readout on an industrial silicon chip, without a qubit count [52]. Yet Quobly has raised €154 million, nearly ten times Groove’s €16 million, with an estimated €65–79 million of French public support. Groove has no recorded Dutch government funding.

France backs Quobly from several sides. Its chips are built on a 300 mm platform developed with CEA-Leti, STMicroelectronics and Soitec [53], it takes part in the PROQCIMA defence programme [42], and Bpifrance invested in its €115 million Series A [54]. In September 2026 that strategy reached into the Netherlands: TNO and Orange Quantum Systems signed agreements with Quobly to industrialise silicon spin qubits [53, 55]. Groove, the Dutch company in the same field and a spin-out of TU Delft, which ranks first worldwide in quantum computing research [5], is not part of it. Groove’s largest public backer is the EU, through €7.5 million of EIC Fund equity, not the Netherlands.

QuantWare and IQM: a supplier needs customers as well as investors

QuantWare’s 64-qubit Tenor powers Italy’s largest quantum computer in Naples [56]; IQM’s 54-qubit Emerald runs on Amazon Braket [57]. Both use superconducting transmon qubits, which puts them in the same class [57, 58]. IQM sells complete computers, while QuantWare supplies processors to other builders and is designing a chiplet architecture for 10,000 qubits [25]. The active support of their national governments as customer and investor, however, differs enormously.

In 2020 Finland’s research institute VTT selected IQM as its innovation partner to develop a quantum computer, within a €20.7 million project funded by the Finnish government [59]. In 2024 it received a €70 million government grant for a 300-qubit system and chose IQM after a competitive tender [59, 60]. That brings VTT’s budgets to €90.7 million, which cover VTT’s own costs as well as IQM’s work. Exhibit 6 counts half as our estimate and the full budgets as the upper bound for IQM. The state investor Tesi has invested in every IQM funding round since 2019, about €72 million by the €275 million Series B in 2025 [61, 62, 63]. It also joined the financing at IQM’s 2026 listing and holds more than 9% of the company [64]. With that home track record, IQM won EuroHPC systems in Germany and Czechia [2, 3].

A Dutch consortium could compete for similar work: the HectoQubit/2 project already combines QuantWare processors, Qblox electronics, Orange Quantum Systems test equipment and Delft Circuits cabling [65]. A commercial order would give them delivery targets and a customer reference.

QuiX and PsiQuantum: the same technology, very different backing

QuiX builds photonic quantum computers on silicon nitride chips. In 2022 it won a €14 million contract from Germany’s DLR to deliver 8- and 64-qubit photonic quantum computers [66, 67], more than half of the €23 million it has raised in total. Dutch public money in the company totals €5.3 million, less than the German contract alone.

PsiQuantum, the best-funded photonic company, raised $1 billion in September 2025 at a $7 billion valuation [68], bringing its total to about €1.8 billion. The US backs it as a customer, with €135 million of DARPA agreements [69] and €31 million of Air Force contracts [70, 71], plus an €86 million CHIPS award [72]. Australia and Queensland added A$940 million in 2024 for a machine in Brisbane [73]; as foreign money, that is not counted in Exhibit 6.

Governments are competing to host photonic quantum computers: the US and Australia pay PsiQuantum to build on their soil, and Germany has done the same with QuiX. The Netherlands has the company and the expertise, but no public buyer. A Dutch order would give QuiX a home reference to win customers abroad.

04Government procurement is the missing link in Dutch industrial policy

Germany and France use paid development contracts and government purchases to finance technological development and create demand. Germany intends about 80% of DLR’s €740 million quantum programme, roughly €592 million, for contracts with companies [74]. France’s PROQCIMA began with a €60 million first phase [42], and its five original companies were promised access to up to €500 million [75]. The UK combines public equity with development contracts and testbeds, and in March 2026 launched ProQure, a staged procurement of quantum computers with up to £1 billion available: up to ten first-phase contracts of up to £14 million each from October 2026, then contracts of up to £75 million for the systems that pass assessment [76].

However, the Netherlands lacks a dedicated quantum procurement programme, so companies can rely only on relatively small grants, equity investments and shared research facilities. The Dutch-hosted EuroHPC tender for a spin-qubit computer at SURF in Amsterdam offers a start, with a ceiling of €9.95 million shared between EuroHPC and the hosting consortium [77, 78]. But the chance that a Dutch supplier wins it is low. The tender asks a single vendor to deliver, install and maintain a complete system [78]. As of October 2026 no award has been announced.

An investment pays for engineers and equipment. An order also gives a company revenue, a specification to meet and a customer reference. After all, a company with a committed buyer finds it easier to convince outside investors. Hardware companies need that experience to turn a prototype into a product they can manufacture repeatedly. Buyers can fund development in stages, test the results, and stop projects that fail to meet agreed requirements.

Government support should therefore not be measured only by how much money is spent, but also by how that money reaches companies and creates commercial opportunities. Competing governments are not merely financing quantum research. They are actively becoming customers of quantum technology, helping companies develop, validate, and sell their products.

05Europe creates quantum start-ups, but the US is better positioned to scale them

Exhibit 7 shows the imbalance: the EU is home to 32% of the world’s quantum companies and the US to 25% [79], yet the European Commission puts the EU’s share of global private investment in quantum at only about 5%, against more than half for the US [80]. That figure may be outdated: the Commission gives no measurement period, and it was published in July 2025, before several large European rounds later that year, such as IQM’s €275 million Series B. Investment in quantum start-ups worldwide has grown fast, from $2.0 billion in 2024 to $12.6 billion in 2025 [81]. Our own estimates, based on McKinsey and PitchBook, put the EU’s current share still below 15%. European quantum computing start-ups, UK included, raised about $1.8 billion in 2025 [82], roughly 14% of that worldwide total, and the EU on its own is a smaller group. US median venture rounds were also about six times larger than European ones between 2019 and 2024 [83].

US companies also have a source of capital that long stayed out of reach for European start-ups: the stock market. IonQ, D-Wave and Rigetti are listed and can raise money from public investors when they need it. In October 2025 IonQ raised $2.0 billion gross in an offering of common stock and warrants, which its chief executive called the largest common-stock investment by a single institution in the industry’s history [84]. In October 2026 IonQ raised another $2.0 billion gross through a similar offering [85]. Each of those offerings is more than five times what the ten Dutch companies in this analysis have raised in total. In 2026 Europe’s front-runners also went public: IQM in July and Pasqal in August, both through a merger with a listed special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) [86, 87]. They chose the US Nasdaq rather than a European exchange, and raised about $234 million and $278 million, a fraction of a single IonQ offering.

Outside the stock market too, the money for European companies that reach scale increasingly comes from the US. The US investor Ten Eleven Ventures led IQM’s Series B in 2025 [88]. QuantWare’s €152 million Series B in May 2026 brought in Intel Capital and In-Q-Tel, the strategic investor for US national security agencies, alongside Dutch backers such as Invest-NL and FORWARD.one [89]. Sometimes the company itself changes hands. In 2025 IonQ bought Oxford Ionics, one of the ten UK companies in our comparison, for $1.075 billion, mostly paid in IonQ shares [90]. About €15 million of British grants and contracts helped build a technology that now belongs to a US company.

US public demand pulls in the same direction. DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative pays companies to show that they can build an industrially useful quantum computer. Of the eleven companies it moved to the second stage in November 2025, only one, Quantum Motion, is European, and none is Dutch [4]. Six companies have now advanced to the final stage, with up to $300 million each; none of them is European [44, 45]. Large quantum investments are also being driven at state level: Maryland’s ‘Capital of Quantum’ initiative aims to mobilise more than $1 billion of public and private investment [91], while Illinois has set aside $500 million for a quantum campus in Chicago [92].

Europe is starting to respond. The Scaleup Europe Fund, launched in August 2026 with the private equity firm EQT as manager, targets €5 billion of growth capital for deep-tech companies, quantum technologies among them [93]. That is the stage at which Dutch companies now fall short. The Quantum Act, a legal framework that lets the Commission and member states invest together, will also be presented soon. It remains to be seen whether these instruments can deliver the speed and impact required, and national co-financing is a key condition in these programmes.

06The upcoming EU Quantum Act creates an opportunity, but the Netherlands must act now

The European Commission is scheduled to present its Quantum Act on 18 November 2026 [94]. Commission officials describe it as an enabling framework and not yet a new budget; that will only become clear in the negotiations on the Multiannual Financial Framework [95]. The act will support countries and clusters that already have companies, facilities and partners ready to take part. Speed matters because other countries are already building their proposals and industrial capabilities.

The Netherlands has built an excellent ecosystem of research and companies. Government policy now needs to mobilise investment, create demand through public procurement and give those companies a better chance to become substantial suppliers.

These proposals largely align with the national quantum strategy; the next step is to turn the ambitions for industrial scale-up into concrete investment decisions, adequate multi-year funding and an implementation plan with clear responsibilities and milestones.