Infleqtion solidifies status as one of Boulder’s biggest quantum players with $100M raise

BOULDER — Infleqtion, a quantum information company, recently drummed up $100 million from investors as part of its Series C fundraiser, further emphasizing the role of the company — along with the Boulder ecosystem in which it operates — as major players in the world’s quantum future.

“Luckily this (Series C round) funds us for many years,” Kinsella told BizWest. And while Infleqtion, which claims to have generated nearly $30 million in revenue last year, expects to be able to reach a financial breakeven point along the runway that the Series C provides, “it would be far too speculative to say that if 12 months from now there was some opportunistic ability to raise capital on good terms whether  we would explore that. But it’s not something we’re proactively doing right at the moment.”

Kinsella declined to provide any forward-looking financial projections for Infleqtion.

Glynn Capital, Counterpoint Global, S32 and Science Applications International Corp. Inc. (Nasdaq: SAIC) were among the Series C investors.

Infleqtion, the trade name used by ColdQuanta Inc.,  hired Kinsella early last year, a few months prior to raising more than $10 million from investors. The company, which has local operations in Louisville and Boulder, had previously raised a $110 million Series B round in 2022 to jumpstart commercialization of its technology.

Quantum theory attempts to explain the behavior of matter at atomic and subatomic levels. Because quantum computers take advantage of special properties of quantum systems such as superposition, their computing power and speed are exponentially greater than a traditional computer. 

Applications of quantum science could revolutionize the way humans discover new drug therapies, map the cosmos, navigate the sea, protect sensitive data, combat climate change and maybe even discover new forms of life in deep space.

In conjunction with the Series C fundraiser, Infleqtion said it is partnering with SAIC, a giant northern Virginia-based government information-technology contractor, on go-to-market efforts and “deployment of quantum sensing technologies, including atomic clocks, quantum RF communication, and inertial sensing, into defense and aerospace applications.”

The partnership will provide Infleqtion with access to SAIC’s “full range of national defense and government customers,” SAIC managing director of venture Lauren Knausenberger said in a statement. “Infleqtion’s visionary advancements in atomic clocks, inertial navigation, and quantum communication directly align with our mission to integrate emerging technologies into active and critical operations to enhance resilience, precision, and ultimately keeping warfighters safe in the most demanding environments.”

While Infleqtion was awarded $11 million from the U.S. Department of Defense late last year to support the development of quantum-timekeeping technology, “SAIC is really a force multiplier on our go-to-market efforts,” Kinsella said. “What they understand is the government doesn’t buy technologies — they buy capabilities. SAIC has a great understanding of what the capability needs are for the relevant government customers, not just in defense but in national security more holistically, which can include areas like critical infrastructure.” 

A robust roster of government clients beyond the military is important for Infleqtion “because our products aren’t really kinetic defense products like bombs or missiles. They’re sensors, they’re timekeeping devices (that keep) critical technologies running” during disruptions to systems such as the GPS satellite network, he said. “So I think that (SAIC is) kind of like the translator of our tech to the government’s needs.”

While President Donald Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to federal funding for technology research and innovation has the leaders of many companies, agencies and laboratories sounding panic alarms, Kinsella said that the new administration hasn’t put the brakes on the quantum sector, particularly for companies like Infleqtion that are moving beyond R&D and into commercialization.

“While there have been a lot of headwinds for basic research funding, whether that’s at (the National Science Foundation) or (U.S. Department of Energy) — and obviously that’s impacted a lot of people’s jobs in our area — quantum has been labeled as one of the critical technologies that this administration wants to continue to support,” Kinsella said. “And while we’ve had some headwinds and cross currents, it’s been mostly a tailwind for quantum.”

But, he acknowledged, the Trump government’s approach to federal funding “is definitely impacting some of the fundamental research dollars that are allocated” for a range of technologies, quantum included.

Still, Kinsella said, “if you look to the beginning of many of the cutting-edge technologies that we’ve experienced in the last 70 years, oftentimes the government has been a leading buyer of those technologies, whether it’s semiconductors or even developing the internet. That’s changed a bit with mobile (telecommunications) and smartphones and AI. But I do still think that the government is often the tip of the spear for some of these new breakthrough technologies.”

He continued: “From a pure ‘follow where the dollars are coming from’ perspective, as a commercial entity, we will be well-suited to focus our efforts on the government because I think they’ll be some of the most motivated buyers of this technology for the next few years.”

That’s not to say that Infleqtion, even with its closer ties to SAIC, plans to ignore the private-sector applications of its technology. With spoofing and cybersecurity threats to global communications and geopositioning networks on the rise, “our clock technology will be very important in commercial, non-government sectors,” Kinsella said. 

And as quantum computers continue to pack on processing muscle in the form of logical qubits, they will “start to do more commercially useful things in the realms of material science and drug discovery,” he added.

Qubits are the basic unit of information for quantum computers, similar to the role bits play in classical computers. In recent years, quantum companies have begun to develop platforms that move beyond the utilization of physical qubits and toward the incorporation of the more powerful and less error-prone logical qubit. 

The commonly held wisdom within the industry, Kinsella said, is that “the minimum threshold for when quantum computers will start to do commercially useful things that classical computers can’t do is about 100 logical qubits, and I think we’ll get there in the next three years. … Quantum computers do things that classical computers can’t do today in the realms of physics and experimentation, it’s just not a commercially useful thing yet.”

Infleqtion has about 180 employees across the organization, roughly 100 of which are in Colorado, working at a pair of facilities in Boulder and Louisville, which are about 20,000 square feet each. The Boulder facility houses the company’s quantum computer, while the Louisville office is the primary home of Infleqtion’s Tiqker quantum-timekeeping technology. The company also has outposts in Chicago; Madison, Wisconsin; Australia; and the United Kingdom.

A portion of the Series C funding is expected to be deployed to grow Infleqtion’s local workforce.

“We are definitely hiring, and this capital helps fund that hiring plan. We’ve been executing against the hiring plan already and that will continue,” Kinsella said. “We’re growing rapidly, so that will mean we will need to continue to scale up the workforce.”

Infleqtion is looking to add workers in various roles such as physicists, engineers, technicians and sales professionals.

The Boulder Valley — with the University of Colorado Boulder physics department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and JILA (formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) — has become one the world’s epicenters of quantum research over the past few decades.

“I do think that it feels like the beginnings of Silicon Valley here for quantum,” Kinsella said.

The local quantum ecosystem got a major shot in the arm last year when the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Tech Hub program granted Elevate Quantum, a nonprofit consortium of about 100 stakeholders who represent industry, academia, capital and laboratories in Colorado and New Mexico, a Phase 2 Tech Hub designation that unlocked $127 million in state and federal funds, which are expected to generate several billion more dollars of private investment in the region’s quantum industry.

“I think Elevate Quantum has just done a great job, well, ‘elevating’ Boulder as the place to be for quantum, and getting the Tech Hub designation here was a game changer,” said Kinsella, who serves on an Elevate Quantum advisory board.

The Boulder Valley has “a world class academic institution (in CU) that’s churning out both (atomic, molecular, and optical, or AMO,) physicists and engineering talent, and we have a force like Elevate Quantum that is helping to organize and push forward the commercialization (of quantum technology). So I think we’ve got all of the ingredients — from the workforce, from the educational side of things, and now government funding coming into this area to help Boulder continue to be the leader in quantum.”

Kinsella said that it’s meaningful to him, as an advisory board member and an industry leader, “to make sure I do my part to help Elevate Quantum achieve its goal.” Infleqtion, boosted by the recent injection of $100 million in capital, is “one of the larger — maybe one of the largest — quantum companies in the Elevate Quantum constituency, and so we think it’s really important for us to do what we can” to continue solidifying the foundation of the broader the regional quantum ecosystem.

“We feel very blessed to be in Boulder and at the heart of what is going to be a really exciting next few years in quantum,” he said. “It’s going to be a great generator of jobs and exciting economic activity in the Front Range region for a long time.”

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