Quantum Dice Puts EIC Accelerator Money on Probabilistic Computing

Conventional processors have to imitate randomness with pseudo-random number generators, which Quantum Dice says costs latency and energy in optimisation and sampling work. The company, a 2020 spin-out of the University of Oxford's Department of Physics, wants to supply the randomness in hardware. It started by selling random numbers drawn from quantum effects in light for encryption, and is now building what it calls a probabilistic processor: a machine made of p-bits, which flip between 0 and 1 with a controllable probability and, when wired together, settle on low-energy configurations that correspond to good answers to hard scheduling and routing problems, as the company describes the method.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, Q-TASTic (Quantum Technologies Accelerating Stochastic Tasks), at its March 2025 cut-off as a grant-only award. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €1,962,055.64, an agreement signed on 28 October 2025 and a project running from 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2027. The company and trade press round the figure to €2 million and say it was one of 40 start-ups picked from about 1,000 applicants, three of them from the UK, per The Quantum Insider and insideHPC on 9 December 2025.

From random numbers to a processor

Quantum Dice announced a £2 million pre-seed round in October 2021: £1 million of venture money led by Elaia Partners with IP Group and the UK Innovation and Science Seed Fund, and £1 million of grant funding from the Quantum Investment Accelerator that IP Group runs with Innovate UK, according to SETsquared and The Quantum Insider. The product then was a compact quantum random number generator whose distinguishing feature is a patented protocol, DISC (source device-independent self-certification), that checks the quality of the randomness continuously while it is being produced instead of relying on statistical tests after the fact.

In November 2023 the company and the Singapore firm SpeQtral announced Zenith, a version of that generator built for the SpeQtral-1 quantum key distribution satellite, rated at 200 to 1,000 megabits per second, per SpeQtral and Via Satellite. Neither announcement gave a launch date. The company's product page still sells the generators as a module, a PCIe card, a rack server and an online entropy service, and its own history dates the move into probabilistic computing to 2025.

What the EIC is paying for

The Q-TASTic objective on CORDIS describes "the world's first probabilistic processor", combining quantum photonic randomness with stochastic computing. The project is to take a prototype from technology readiness level 6 to level 8, adding a general architecture for stochastic tasks, an optimised compiler and cloud deployment. It targets ten times lower energy use and ten times higher speed than classical approaches, in AI inference, logistics, climate modelling, drug discovery and financial risk. Those are the company's targets in its application, not results the EIC has checked.

Some of the hardware already exists in public. A preprint posted on arXiv on 6 November 2025 by five authors from Quantum Dice and Oxford, including the chief executive and chief technology officer, describes an opto-electronic prototype built from photonic integrated circuits and programmable logic that handles 64,000 logical p-bits at 2.7 billion flips per second and 4.9 nanojoules per flip. The authors claim close to three orders of magnitude better speed and energy efficiency than p-bit systems built from magnetic tunnel junctions. The paper is a preprint, posted without peer review. The company's ORBIT product page gives the same 64,000 p-bits and 2.7 gigaflips per second for Lagrange-0, a system in a standard 2U server case with an Ethernet interface.

The p-bit is a classical device: the preprint itself sets it apart from the qubit of a quantum computer. The quantum part is the light source that supplies the randomness and the DISC check on it. The comparison that matters for a buyer, Lagrange-0 against conventional optimisation software on a CPU or GPU on the same problem, is not published in either source.

1. Working probabilistic processor prototypeExists64,000 logical p-bits described in the arXiv preprint and on the product page; the project summary already put the prototype at TRL 6.
2. TRL 6 to TRL 8RunningProject ends September 2027; CORDIS shows no report yet.
3. 10x energy and 10x speed against classical approachesClaimThe only published comparison is against magnetic tunnel junction p-bits, in a preprint.
4. Compiler and cloud deploymentPartly visibleThe company's site offers online access to ORBIT and developer tools; their scope is not documented publicly.

First users: a police force and an air traffic controller

On 12 March 2026 Quantum Dice and NATS, the UK's air traffic control provider, announced that they would explore probabilistic methods for air traffic management, for resilience, forecasting and decision support, per the company's release, which quotes NATS lead researcher Ben Carvell. No contract value is given. A Dealroom profile also lists the collaboration.

On 15 September 2026 the company and North Wales Police published results of Project PROTECT, a proof-of-technology on where to station response vehicles, supported by the Test and Learn Programme of the UK Policing National Science and Innovation Board. In a modelled scenario that kept one vehicle at each of five station wards and placed ten more, average response time fell to 4.82 minutes, about 40% below the station-based baseline; the company's headline puts it 52% below the study's 10-minute target. The results rest on historical demand data, and further validation is needed before operational use, per the company's release and The Quantum Insider. Neither says what the project cost or whether the force paid for it.

On the older product line, the company's resources page lists a March 2026 case study in which an unnamed "major wireless carrier" used its entropy service in a quantum-safe VPN demonstration at Mobile World Congress 2025. The carrier is not named, so the claim could not be checked.

The accounts: net liabilities, then new shares

Quantum Dice files small-company accounts at Companies House without a profit and loss account, so neither revenue nor the annual loss is public. The balance sheets show the rest. Cash stood at £1.62 million at 30 April 2023 and fell to £378,548 a year later, when the company reported net liabilities of £202,776. The 2024 accounts also restated 2023: £500,000 of unsecured convertible loan notes issued in November 2022 had been booked as share premium and were reclassified as debt.

The filing history records share allotments on 19 August and 16 October 2024 and new share classes adopted in July 2024. By 30 April 2025 the share premium account had risen from £2.43 million to £6.54 million, the loan notes no longer appeared as a liability, cash stood at £2.81 million and net assets at £3.05 million. Accumulated losses reached £3.49 million. No announcement of a funding round matching those allotments could be found on the company's news page or in trade press, so the investors and the price are not public. The directors state in the 2024 and 2025 accounts that they expect the company to have adequate resources for at least twelve months.

The accounts for the year to April 2025 were approved on 3 July 2026 and filed on 6 July 2026, after the nine-month deadline for a private company with an April year end had passed on 31 January 2026. The register lists a first Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off dated 7 July 2026 and an entry dated 4 July 2026 stating that compulsory strike-off action has been discontinued. The company is shown as active, with its next accounts due by 31 January 2027.

A UK company in an EU programme

UK companies have been eligible for EIC Accelerator grants since the United Kingdom became associated to Horizon Europe on 1 January 2024, per the European Commission and UKRO; five UK grant-only projects from the October 2021 cut-off were rejected for lack of that agreement, per the EIC's note of 15 September 2022. The Commission's Quantum Europe Strategy of 2 July 2025 sets the goal of European leadership in quantum by 2030, with industrial deployment among its five areas. Quantum Dice fits it at the edge: its randomness source is quantum, its computer is not, and its first named users are British organisations.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.