The $110 Million Bet on the Company That Wants to Be the Microsoft of Quantum Computing

There is a particular phrase that gets thrown around a lot in the technology industry — usually by founders with ambition, occasionally by people who have earned the right to mean it. "We are building the Microsoft of X." It signals category leadership. A platform others build on top of. An infrastructure layer so fundamental that the rest of the industry depends on it.

On 12 May 2025, Nir Minerbi, CEO and co-founder of Tel Aviv-based quantum software company Classiq, said it about his own company. "We are building the Microsoft of quantum computing," he announced alongside a funding round that immediately made people pay attention. Not because of the audacity of the claim — plenty of founders say things like that — but because of what came with it: $110 million in Series C funding, the largest single investment ever raised by a quantum software company, bringing Classiq's total funding to $173 million.

Then, a few months later, SoftBank joined. Then AMD. Then Qualcomm. Then IonQ. By the end of 2025, that Series C had grown to more than $200 million. And the phrase Minerbi used in May — "the Microsoft of quantum computing" — started sounding less like a pitch and more like a plan.

This is the story of what Classiq has built, why the world's most sophisticated investors are betting this much on it, and what any of it means for the technology that most people have heard of but almost nobody yet fully understands.

First Things First: What Is Quantum Computing, Actually?

Before you can understand why Classiq matters, you need to understand the problem it is solving. And before that, you need a working sense of what quantum computing actually is — not the science fiction version, not the breathless press release version, but the real one.

Classical computers — the ones in your phone, your laptop, the servers powering the internet — operate using bits. A bit is the most fundamental unit of information in a classical system, and it can be in exactly one of two states at any given moment: 0 or 1. Everything a classical computer does, from playing a video to running a financial model, is ultimately a very sophisticated arrangement of billions of these binary switches flipping on and off at enormous speed.

Quantum computers operate using qubits. A qubit, unlike a classical bit, can exist in what physicists call a superposition of states — it can be 0, 1, or any combination of both simultaneously, until the moment it is measured. This sounds like a technical distinction, but its practical implications are staggering. It means that a quantum computer does not process one possibility at a time and then move to the next. It explores multiple possibilities at once. For certain classes of problems — optimisation, simulation, cryptography, drug discovery, materials science — this gives quantum computers an exponential advantage over classical systems.

The global quantum computing market was valued at roughly $1.3 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach nearly $7 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual rate of over 32%. Governments have woken up to this. The United States, China, the European Union, India, Japan, and the UK have all launched national quantum initiatives, committing billions in public funding. IBM has quantum computers you can access through the cloud. Google has been pursuing quantum supremacy since at least 2019. Microsoft has built Azure Quantum. The hardware race has been running for years.

And yet, for most organisations that might want to actually use a quantum computer, there is a problem that no hardware announcement has solved. Building a quantum application requires knowledge that barely exists outside a small community of theoretical physicists and specialised engineers. You cannot just hire a good software developer and point them at a quantum machine. The programming model is fundamentally different. The error rates are high. The hardware is fragile, requiring cooling to temperatures near absolute zero. Writing a quantum circuit from scratch is an exercise in applied quantum mechanics, not software engineering.

That is the gap Classiq was built to close.

Three Founders and a Big Idea

Classiq was founded in 2020 by three people who had, between them, exactly the right combination of expertise to see both the problem and the solution clearly.

Nir Minerbi, the CEO, came from the business side — a background in enterprise technology and a clear sense of what companies would actually need to adopt quantum computing at scale. Yehuda Naveh, the CTO, was a former IBM researcher with deep expertise in quantum algorithms and formal verification — the kind of knowledge that allows you to understand, at a fundamental level, how quantum circuits work and how they can be automatically generated. Amir Naveh, the Chief Product Officer, brought product engineering to the table — the ability to translate theoretical capability into something that a developer working at BMW or Citi could actually use on a Monday morning.

The idea they built around was, in retrospect, obvious — but only in the way that the best ideas always look obvious after someone has already done them. They asked: what if you did not need to understand quantum mechanics to build a quantum application?

The analogy to early computing is apt and worth dwelling on. When computers first existed, you programmed them at the hardware level — writing instructions in machine code, managing memory addresses directly, knowing the precise architecture of the processor. As the industry matured, layers of abstraction appeared. Assembly language. High-level programming languages like C and Java. Integrated development environments. Cloud platforms. Each layer removed the need to understand what was happening beneath it. A web developer today does not need to know how a microchip works. They just write code.

Classiq is building that abstraction layer for quantum. Their platform — which provides an integrated development environment, a compiler, and an operating system for quantum hardware — allows developers to describe what they want their quantum program to achieve, and then automatically generates the optimised quantum circuits that will make it happen. Those circuits can then run on virtually any quantum hardware backend: IBM's machines, IonQ's, Quantinuum's, and more. The platform is hardware-agnostic by design.

The technical achievement underneath this is formidable. Classiq's proprietary algorithmic quantum circuit compilation technology can synthesise quantum circuits with millions of gates — enabling sophisticated quantum programs to scale in ways that manual circuit writing simply cannot. The company holds over 60 granted or filed patents on core quantum technologies. This is not a wrapper around someone else's infrastructure. It is deep, original engineering.

The $110 Million Round: Who Invested and Why

The Series C round announced on 12 May 2025 was led by Entrée Capital, a venture firm with a strong track record in Israeli deep tech. Joining the round were Norwest, NightDragon, Hamilton Lane, Clal, Neva SGR, Phoenix, Team8, IN Venture, Wing, HSBC, Samsung Next, and QBeat.

Each of these investors brings something beyond capital. HSBC's participation is a direct signal about where one of the world's largest banks sees quantum computing heading. Financial services firms like HSBC and Citi — Citi is already a Classiq customer — are acutely aware that quantum algorithms could transform risk modelling, portfolio optimisation, and fraud detection in ways that classical computing cannot. The moment quantum computers can run these algorithms reliably at scale, the banks that have been building on Classiq's platform will have a significant advantage over those that are starting from scratch.

Samsung Next, the corporate investment arm of the Samsung Group, brings a strategic interest in what quantum computing could mean for chip design and cryptographic systems — the areas Samsung needs to secure its long-term position in semiconductor manufacturing. NightDragon, a fund focused on cybersecurity and national security, sees quantum computing's implications for encryption and data protection.

But the round did not stop at $110 million. In July 2025, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Italy's CDP Venture Capital, the country's largest venture fund, joined. That brought total funding to between $185 million and $200 million. Then, in November 2025, AMD Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, and quantum hardware maker IonQ added to the round, pushing it past $200 million. By any measure, this is one of the most significant quantum software investments ever assembled — and the roster of names tells you that this is not speculative early-stage betting. This is strategic positioning by companies and investors who believe quantum computing is on the verge of real commercial impact.

The Customers Are Already Here

One of the most telling details in the Classiq story is not the investor list. It is the customer list.

Classiq counts BMW Group, Rolls-Royce, Citi, Comcast, and Toshiba among its enterprise customers. Dozens of the world's top enterprise teams use the platform. Hundreds of academic institutions worldwide rely on it for research. The company has tripled its customer base and revenues year over year.

These are not pilot programs or research experiments. BMW is using quantum computing for automotive engineering optimisation. Rolls-Royce is exploring quantum algorithms for aerospace applications. Citi is investigating quantum approaches to financial modelling. These are serious organisations making serious operational investments — and they are doing it on Classiq's platform rather than building quantum capability from the ground up.

The reason is straightforward. Building a quantum development capability from scratch requires either hiring physicists who can write quantum circuits — an extraordinarily small and competitive talent pool — or licensing a platform that removes the need for that expertise. For a large enterprise, Classiq's value proposition is immediate and concrete: reduce the time to build a quantum application from years to months, allow your existing software engineers to work on quantum problems with tools they can actually understand, and run whatever you build on any quantum hardware that makes sense for your use case.

The partnerships on the technology side are equally telling. Classiq works with Microsoft, NVIDIA, and AWS. These are not names that partner casually. Microsoft's Azure Quantum ecosystem, NVIDIA's interest in quantum-classical hybrid computing, and AWS's quantum computing infrastructure are all integrations that make Classiq a more powerful and more accessible platform. The company is not competing with these giants — it is becoming the development layer that sits on top of all of them.

The "Microsoft" Claim, Examined

Let us take Minerbi's "Microsoft of quantum computing" phrase seriously, because it deserves examination rather than just repetition.

The Microsoft analogy is specific and instructive. In the early decades of personal computing, hardware companies built the machines — IBM, Apple, later Dell and others. What made the computing revolution truly accessible was not the hardware. It was the software platform that ran on top of the hardware and allowed developers to build applications without understanding the specifics of the underlying machine. DOS, and later Windows, were not the most technically impressive things about personal computing. But they were the most important, because they made everything else possible.

IBM's Qiskit is a low-level programming framework. Google's Cirq is similar. Microsoft's Azure Quantum provides cloud access to quantum hardware. What none of them do, at Classiq's level, is provide a high-level abstraction that allows engineers without quantum physics training to build sophisticated quantum applications. That is the Microsoft analogy: not the hardware manufacturer, but the company that made the hardware useful to everyone else.

The bet Classiq is making is that the quantum hardware race will eventually produce multiple viable platforms — IBM's, Google's, IonQ's, Quantinuum's — and that the company which owns the software development layer running across all of them will be in the strongest possible position. This is exactly what happened in classical computing. Hardware diversified. The platform layer consolidated. The platform companies won.

Whether Classiq becomes that platform company is a question only the next decade can answer. But the fact that AMD, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Microsoft, SoftBank, and HSBC are all investing in or partnering with it suggests the market's most sophisticated participants think it has a real shot.

What the Money Will Do

Classiq has been transparent about how the Series C will be deployed, and the plan reflects a company that has found product-market fit and is now scaling aggressively.

The primary focus areas are global expansion, team growth, and deeper cloud integration. The company currently employs around 100 people, 75 of whom are based in Israel. The funding will support significant hiring across R&D, go-to-market, and customer success — adding the human infrastructure needed to support a rapidly growing enterprise customer base across North America, Europe, and Asia. Classiq has already been participating in national quantum initiatives in multiple countries; the new funding will allow it to deepen those relationships and become a more central player in government-backed quantum programmes.

The deepening of cloud integrations with AWS and Azure will make the platform more accessible to the millions of enterprises that already run their operations on these clouds. A developer at a pharmaceutical company working on drug discovery simulations does not need to build a new infrastructure relationship with a quantum hardware provider. They need to be able to access Classiq's tools from within the environment they already use. The cloud integrations make that possible.

The long-term ambition Minerbi has articulated is enabling "millions of engineers" to build quantum algorithms — the same way that millions of engineers today build web applications or use machine learning libraries. That is a large number. The current population of engineers with any quantum computing capability is probably measured in tens of thousands globally. Getting from there to millions requires exactly what Classiq is building: an abstraction layer so well-designed that quantum development feels, eventually, like any other kind of software development.

A Final Word: Why This Actually Matters

Quantum computing has been "five to ten years away" from practical impact for roughly three decades. The graveyard of overhyped quantum predictions is well-populated. Scepticism is reasonable.

But something has changed in the last few years that is harder to dismiss. The hardware has genuinely improved. IBM's 1,000-qubit processors, Google's continued progress, IonQ's trapped-ion systems — these are not the same machines that existed five years ago. Error rates are falling. Qubit counts are rising. The gap between what quantum computers can do today and what they need to do to have commercial impact is closing, even if it has not yet closed entirely.

In that context, building the software layer now — before the hardware reaches full capability — is exactly the right moment to do it. When the hardware is ready, the companies that have already built their quantum development capability on a mature, enterprise-grade platform will be able to move immediately. The companies that wait will be scrambling to build from scratch while their competitors are already running.

Classiq tripled its customer base and revenues year over year and is used by dozens of the top enterprise teams and hundreds of academic institutions worldwide. That is not the profile of a science experiment. That is the profile of a company that has found a real problem, built a real solution, and is now growing into the scale that the problem demands.

The $110 million — now more than $200 million — is not a bet on a future that might arrive. It is a bet on a company that is already here, solving a problem that already exists, for customers who are already paying.

The Microsoft of quantum computing has to come from somewhere. Classiq has made a very credible case that it intends to be the answer.