Irish quantum computing startup Equal1 has raised $60 million in a funding round that will enable it to further accelerate the development of its Bell-1 silicon quantum server.

The round was led by the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund and saw participation from Atlantic Bridge, the European Innovation Council Fund, Matterwave Ventures, Enterprise Ireland, Elkstone, and TNO Ventures.

It brings the total raised by the company to $85m. In a statement, Equal1 said the newly raised funds will be used to deploy Bell-1 into HPC across the world, scale the company’s manufacturing efforts, advance its roadmap, and grow its team.

“This $60m in funding marks the transition of Equal1 from development to deployment,” said Jason Lynch, CEO of Equal1. “As AI pushes classical computing into power and cost limits, quantum is the way forward, but only if it can be manufactured and deployed like the rest of the stack. By building quantum processors on standard silicon, we’re turning quantum from bespoke hardware into deployable infrastructure – positioning Equal1 as the quantum standard for HPC.”

Spun out of University College Dublin in 2018, Equal1 has been developing a quantum processor using silicon spin qubits, a technology that has been co-developed by TNO and Delft University of Technology.

The company unveiled its Bell-1 quantum server in March 2025. Named after John Stewart Bell, the Belfast-born physicist whose work focused on quantum mechanics, Bell-1 is a silicon-based offering that operates at 1,600W and slots “seamlessly” into existing data centers and high-performance computing (HPC) environments by plugging into standard electrical sockets.

The server functions as a six-qubit quantum processing system, with its UnityQ QPU sitting alongside existing CPU and GPU-based workloads. Its closed-cycle cryo-cooler allows the machine to operate at 0.3 Kelvin (-272.85°C) without requiring large external dilution refrigerators, while future generations of the Bell Quantum Server family will incorporate Equal1’s Quantum System on Chip technology.

Upon its release, Equal1 said the Bell-1 had been designed to augment, rather than replace, classical computing.