SemiQon's EIC Accelerator Bet: €17.5M for Chips That Run Cold

Quantum computers run in refrigerators close to absolute zero, but most of the electronics that control them do not. Each qubit is wired to control and readout electronics at room temperature, and as machines grow to hundreds and thousands of qubits, the cables, heat and cost grow with them. SemiQon, a spin-off of Finland's VTT research centre, makes silicon CMOS chips designed to work inside the cold, close to the qubits.

The EIC Accelerator selected SemiQon at its October 2024 cut-off under the challenge for emerging quantum technology components. The award announced in February 2025 was €17.5 million: a €2.5 million grant for the project COOL-CHIPS and €15 million of equity, according to BeBeez and eeNews Europe. In July 2026 the Finnish founder's office PostScriptum added a strategic investment. What SemiQon has not announced is a customer.

Fifteen years of VTT research, then a company

The technology was developed at VTT over 10 to 15 years before SemiQon existed, according to VTT's own case study. The founding team, CEO Himadri Majumdar and fabrication lead Markku Kainlauri from VTT and founding scientists Janne Lehtinen and Mika Prunnila, worked on the intellectual property and the business plan inside VTT's LaunchPad incubator in 2022 and spun out in early 2023. The Finnish Trade Register shows SemiQon Technologies Oy registered on 8 September 2022.

By February 2023 the company had raised €2 million from Voima Ventures, Lunar Ventures, Dhyan Ventures, Tiny Supercomputer VC and the Atomico Angel Programme, among others, according to BeBeez. Its chips are made at Micronova in Espoo, a pilot-line cleanroom that VTT describes as the largest semiconductor research cleanroom in the Nordics, and VTT itself is a client of SemiQon's manufacturing.

Ordinary silicon, unusual temperature

SemiQon's chips use commercially established silicon materials, design and manufacturing technology, VTT writes. The aim is CMOS circuits that control and read out qubits inside the cryostat, which could let quantum computers run at higher temperatures and with less infrastructure and energy. The same chips are pitched for space electronics and for data centres and supercomputers.

The claims are large and come from the company and VTT. The October 2025 EARTO award release cites 50% to 90% lower power for space applications, up to 30% lower readout infrastructure cost and volume for quantum computers in the short term and more than tenfold in the long term, and chips more than 50% cheaper to make than competitors'. The CORDIS summary speaks of a 100-fold efficiency increase over existing technology. None of these figures has been published in an independent test.

COOL-CHIPS: from prototype to customer tests

CORDIS lists COOL-CHIPS from 1 August 2025 to 31 July 2027 with a grant of €2,499,999, signed on 10 October 2025, more than two months after the project's official start. The project is to commercialise SemiQon's cryogenic CMOS product in a European foundry run by a research organisation. In the February 2025 announcement Majumdar set the goal of moving the product from technology readiness level 6 to 8 in two years, including tests by customers in their own environments.

The project page shows no periodic report yet. VTT's case study, last updated in June 2026, says SemiQon has started generating revenue from its cryogenic CMOS product line and reports strong customer demand, without naming customers. The EARTO prize SemiQon shared with VTT in October 2025 was in the category for expected impact, not achieved impact.

1. Cryogenic CMOS product at TRL 8In progressTRL 6 in February 2025; no later readiness level reported.
2. Customer testing in their own environmentsNot publicRevenue mentioned by VTT; no customer named.
3. Volume manufacturingFundedPostScriptum's 2026 investment is earmarked for it; production stays at Micronova.
4. Project completion by July 2027Too earlyNo periodic report on CORDIS yet.

The EIC as lead investor

The €15 million of equity announced by the EIC is seven and a half times what SemiQon had raised by February 2023. In July 2026 PostScriptum, the founder's office of Silo AI co-founder Peter Sarlin, made a strategic equity investment of undisclosed size to scale up production of the control and readout chips, and announced a €30 million commitment to quantum hardware such as cryo-electronics and cooling modules, Quantum Computing Report wrote. SemiQon's Finnish accounts were not obtained for this article, so its revenue and losses are not known here.

Quantum hardware made in Finland

The EIC funded COOL-CHIPS under a challenge for emerging quantum technology components, the parts a European quantum computer industry needs besides the qubits. SemiQon makes its chips in Espoo, in a cleanroom run by a public research organisation, which keeps both the design and the manufacturing in Europe. VTT also plans a new quantum production hub, Kvanttinova, in Espoo, where some of SemiQon's production is to move later.