planqc, an EIC Accelerator Winner, Scales Neutral-Atom Qubits

A neutral-atom quantum computer holds its qubits as single atoms trapped in beams of laser light, and every time it finishes a computation and reads them out, the register has to be loaded again, according to the project planqc took to the European Innovation Council. That project, RUBIQON, credits neutral atoms with "superior scalability to millions of qubits" but says they are held back by "operational dead time as quantum registers must be completely reloaded after each computation cycle", which it says rules out industry-relevant algorithms on error-corrected machines, according to CORDIS.

The EIC selected RUBIQON for blended finance in the round it announced on 15 June 2026; PLANQC GMBH is the only quantum computing company in the list of 38 selected companies. The grant agreement was signed on 23 September 2026, and CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,497,281.50 for 1 October 2026 to 30 September 2028. The project is a month old. What can be checked is the company that carries it.

A Max Planck spin-off with two government machines to build

planqc came out of the Munich Quantum Valley initiative in April 2022, founded by researchers from MPQ and LMU Munich, and raised €4.6 million in seed money led by UVC Partners and Speedinvest, as The Quantum Insider reported in June 2022. The company register, via North Data, shows the first registration publication on 12 May 2022 and three capital increases since, from €25,000 to €45,608 in June 2024. It shows no insolvency. Accounts for 2024 were filed in October 2025; their figures could not be read for this article.

The first large order came from the German Aerospace Center. On 27 April 2023 the DLR Quantum Computing Initiative announced a €29 million contract for a scalable prototype with more than 100 qubits, to be developed within three and a half years at its innovation centre in Ulm; Munich Quantum Valley gives the same figures. planqc's own news page dates its item on the contract 4 May 2022, a year before DLR's release.

In July 2024 planqc announced a €50 million Series A led by CATRON Holding and the DeepTech & Climate Fonds, with a non-dilutive grant from the federal research ministry counted as part of it, as The Quantum Insider and the German tech site Basic Thinking reported. Basic Thinking puts the company's total capital, public money included, at about €80 to €90 million; the company has not published a total.

Atoms in crystals of light

planqc traps individual neutral atoms in a vacuum with laser beams, arranges them in regular arrays and drives them with laser pulses, exciting them into Rydberg states so they interact, as DLR describes it. CTO Sebastian Blatt calls the atoms' arrangement "crystals of light", according to The Quantum Insider. The founders said in 2022 that the design runs at room temperature, according to The Quantum Insider. DLR's release contrasts this with superconducting systems, which need extremely low temperatures.

Sources disagree on the element. Basic Thinking writes that planqc uses strontium, while planqc's September 2026 announcement of its LOGIQC consortium and Quantum Computing Report describe that machine as based on ytterbium. Whether the two are different systems or the company has moved from one to the other is not stated.

The reload pause RUBIQON names is one planqc's LRZ design already works around on paper. For the 1,000-qubit system it chose two independent cores, so that "while one core resets, the other keeps computing", as The Quantum Insider summarised the design in November 2024. RUBIQON's CORDIS summary goes further, to fault-tolerant digital computing; it publishes no qubit, fidelity or error-rate target.

What has been delivered, and what is late

The clearest public milestone is a delivery. On 9 September 2026 planqc announced that the first hardware of MAQCS, its 1,000-qubit system for the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre funded with almost €20 million by the federal research ministry, had arrived at LRZ: about 800 kilograms of server cabinet, laser hardware and computing rack. The company says it has met every technical milestone on schedule, including a 1,000-qubit demonstrator at technology readiness level 5, and plans to commission the full system in 2027 and run it as a co-processor in LRZ's supercomputers by the end of that year. The milestone claims are the company's own; LRZ's original project page now returns an error, and no independent test of the demonstrator has been published.

The DLR machine is the older promise. DLR's April 2023 release gave planqc three and a half years, a window that ran to about October 2026. In its 16 September 2026 announcement of the Made in Europe Award, planqc said both the 100-qubit DLR system and the LRZ system "are due online next year". No delivery or installation in Ulm has been announced by DLR or planqc as of 4 November 2026, and DLR's partner page for planqc gives no status. Whether the contract schedule was changed is not public.

Around the hardware, planqc's news page lists application projects: aerospace materials with d-fine for DLR in February 2025, work for ESA's Ariane 6 launcher with nebumind and MT Aerospace in June 2025, and aviation with TUM, ENGYS and Airbus on behalf of DLR in September 2025. In March 2026 it announced QIAPO, a €2.3 million federally funded optimisation project with Saarland University, BMW and Infineon; planqc's share is not stated. CORDIS lists planqc as a partner in two other EU projects, with €150,000 in QCFD and €252,678 in the P4Q photonics pilot line.

What RUBIQON promised

The CORDIS record is brief. It names the bottleneck, reloading the atom register after each run, and the goal, error-corrected digital neutral-atom computing able to run industry-relevant algorithms. It gives no total project cost, publishes no deliverables and has no periodic report, which is expected one month into a 24-month project. The selection list recommends blended finance, meaning the grant plus a possible equity stake from the EIC Fund; planqc has no entry in the EIC Fund portfolio as checked on 4 November 2026, and planqc's news page has not announced the award. The EIC's list carries its own caveat: selection "does not constitute a formal commitment for funding" until grant preparation is finished; CORDIS now shows the grant agreement as signed.

1. Grant agreement signedDoneSigned 23 September 2026; €2,497,281.50 per CORDIS.
2. Remove reload dead time in neutral-atom registersToo earlyProject started 1 October 2026; no results published.
3. Fault-tolerant digital operationToo earlyNo error-rate or logical-qubit target published in CORDIS.
4. EIC Fund equityNot publishedNo investment listed in the EIC Fund portfolio.

Why Europe is paying for it twice

The Commission adopted its Quantum Europe Strategy in July 2025. According to The Quantum Insider, it aims to raise the share of global private quantum funding that goes to European companies, put at around 5%, and announces a Quantum Act proposal for 2026. RUBIQON's own summary frames the project the same way, as a matter of "Europe's quantum sovereignty" against better-funded US competitors.

Germany is backing the same company on the same goal. On 22 September 2026 planqc said its LOGIQC consortium, with MPQ, LMU, the University of Tübingen, Forschungszentrum Jülich and TOPTICA Photonics, was one of six selected for the federal research ministry's Quantum Computing Competition, a programme of up to €640 million aiming for at least two error-corrected machines at the European frontier by 2030, with a functioning entry system due from each consortium by 31 March 2027; Quantum Computing Report and The Quantum Insider report the same. How LOGIQC's funding for planqc will compare with the EIC grant is not public.

planqc was not asked for comment for this article. The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.