Quanfluence, a deep-technology company incubated at the IIT Madras Incubation Cell, announced October 7 that it has raised $10 million in a Series A led by Chiratae Ventures. Pi Ventures, which led the startup’s seed round, returned as a co-investor, and Rainmatter by Zerodha also participated. The company will use the money to combine its indigenously fabricated photonic integrated circuits, custom electronic control silicon and software algorithms into one unified machine, with early processors targeted for 2027 and larger, scalable systems by 2029.
Founded in 2021 by Sujoy Chakravarty, Ravi Mehta, Biman Chattopadhyay, Aditi Vaidya, Prof. Anil Prabhakar of IIT Madras and Prof. Sandeep Goyal of IISER Mohali, Quanfluence bets on photonics as the most credible route to a scalable quantum computer: encoding information in light routed through optical circuits avoids the cryogenic cooling superconducting systems need and the ultra-high vacuum of trapped-ion machines. Three of the founders previously built Silicon and Beyond, a semiconductor IP company later acquired by Synopsys, giving the team a chip-design pedigree unusual in quantum startups.
Unlike most quantum hardware companies, Quanfluence already has commercial products: its time-multiplexed photonic Ising machine for combinatorial optimization is already commercialized, alongside other quantum devices. The new capital lets the team assemble the pieces it has built, photonic chips, electronics, optics and algorithms, into a complete system. The round landed in the same week as Oratomic’s $775 million raise and Universal Quantum’s $100 million-plus UK Series A, making it one of the largest quantum rounds announced in India.