The quantum industry attracted over $4.9 billion in venture capital funding in 2025, more than 2x 2024’s record total. Total public commitments have surpassed $56 billion globally, following a $12.7 billion uplift in 2025. Yet for all the capital flowing into the sector, a striking pattern persists: the funding funnel narrows sharply at the scale-up phase. Surviving the leap from promising research to investable company remains the sector's defining challenge, and it is at the Series A and B stage where the critical filters are applied.

For investors evaluating quantum companies at this inflection point, the question is not whether the science is impressive, as it almost always is. Rather, the question is whether the company has assembled the right combination of validated technology, commercial traction, scalable ambition, and organisational maturity to justify the next phase of capital. What follows is a closer look at the four pillars that Firgun Ventures, and other growth stage quantum-focused investors more broadly, weigh most heavily.

1. Validated technology with defensible advantages

At Series A and B, a quantum company's technology must have moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage. Investors expect to see results that have been validated through peer-reviewed publications, reproducible benchmarks, or patent-protected intellectual property (IP), ideally all three. The distinction is important because quantum computing is a field where theoretical elegance and engineering reality often diverge. A novel qubit architecture that performs well in a controlled laboratory setting may behave very differently when subjected to the noise, error rates, and integration demands of a real-world system.

What investors look for, specifically, is evidence that the company's approach offers a demonstrable advantage over competing methods, whether that advantage lies in qubit fidelity, coherence times, error correction overhead, or algorithmic efficiency. Patent portfolios provide one layer of defensibility, but they are most compelling when paired with published results that independent researchers can scrutinise. The technology need not be fully mature, but it must be differentiated and demonstrably progressing.

Photonic Inc., a Firgun Ventures portfolio company, illustrates this well. The Vancouver-based company has built its architecture around T centre defects in silicon, a qubit modality that natively integrates compute, memory, and optical communication on a single platform. In 2024, Photonic demonstrated entanglement between separate silicon modules connected via telecom fibre, a result published in Nature and validated by Microsoft's quantum engineering team. More recently, Photonic Inc. developed SHYPS, a novel family of quantum error correction codes that its researchers describe as reducing the qubit overhead for fault-tolerant computing by a factor of 20. That combination of defensible IP and open scientific validation is precisely what growth investors want to see.

2. Early customer pilots and paid engagements

Perhaps the most telling signal at Series A and B is whether anyone is willing to pay for what the company has built. Early revenue, paid pilots, or co-development partnerships with large corporations, particularly in sectors such as pharmaceuticals, financial services, and advanced materials, carry disproportionate weight in investor assessments. They indicate that a real-world customer has evaluated the technology against their own needs and concluded it is worth committing resources to, a validation that no amount of internal benchmarking can replicate.

This is where a subtle but important distinction arises. Many quantum companies derive their initial income from research grants or government-funded programmes. While these provide essential runway and credibility, they do not, on their own, demonstrate long-term commercial viability. The companies that stand out are those that can point to a customer base, whether in academia, national laboratories, or industry, that is purchasing products or services rather than simply participating in funded research. 

One of the most robust signals is when a strategic partner backs a collaboration with significant capital. In November 2023, Photonic Inc. entered a strategic collaboration with Microsoft, integrating its silicon spin-photon platform with Microsoft's Azure Quantum Elements. The partnership is reciprocal, as Photonic gains access to Microsoft's software and cloud expertise, while Microsoft strengthens its quantum ecosystem by incorporating Photonic's networking capabilities. In the same month, Microsoft participated in a $100 million-plus funding round for Photonic to support this development, one of the only publicly-announced quantum startups in which Microsoft has made a direct investment. That kind of commitment, a major technology company putting both engineering resources and investment capital behind a partnership, represents a tier of validation that goes well beyond a standard pilot agreement. 

Quantum Elements, another Firgun Ventures portfolio company, offers a compelling example. The Los Angeles-based startup launched its Constellation platform from stealth in late 2025 and within months secured partnerships with Rigetti, IBM, Quantum Machines, and AWS, alongside research collaborations with the National University of Singapore and UCLA. The platform serves both hardware companies seeking to improve gate fidelity through AI-driven digital twins and researchers developing quantum applications across the stack. That cross-ecosystem adoption, even at an early stage, signals a genuine and widely felt need. For earlier-stage companies, even modest paid engagements signal that the transition from grant-dependent to revenue-generating is underway.

At Series A, a handful of paid pilots or letters of intent from credible counterparties can be sufficient. By Series B, the expectation sharpens, as investors want to ideally see recurring engagements, expanding contract values, or evidence that initial pilots have converted into longer-term commercial relationships. 

3. A credible technical roadmap towards scalability

Investors at this stage are not expecting a fully realised product roadmap, but they are looking for a credible, technically grounded plan for how the company intends to move from where it is today to where it needs to be. In hardware, this typically means a clear trajectory towards fault-tolerant quantum computing, including milestones around error correction, logical qubit counts, and system scalability. The industry's current focus on reaching approximately 100 logical qubits represents a widely recognised threshold at which commercially meaningful computations become feasible, and companies that can articulate how they intend to get there, with what resources and on what timeline, are far better positioned to attract capital.

The distinction between stages matters here too, given a Series A company might reasonably present a roadmap with key technical milestones still ahead, while a Series B company is expected to have already hit several of those milestones and to be executing against the next set with demonstrable momentum. 

For software and algorithms companies, the equivalent test is whether the company can demonstrate, or credibly project, a quantum advantage over classical computing for specific, commercially relevant problems. This is not a trivial bar, as it requires deep understanding of both the quantum hardware landscape and the classical alternatives, and demands honesty about where quantum methods genuinely outperform and where they do not yet. 

Alignment with national quantum initiatives, such as the US National Quantum Initiative,  The UK National Quantum Technologies Programme (NQTP), or the EU's Quantum Flagship programme, provides an additional layer of credibility. Photonic Inc.'s selection by DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative in November 2025, advancing to Stage B after proposing a utility-scale quantum computer concept, is a case in point of independent, government-grade validation of both the architecture and the team's ability to deliver. These programmes signal that a company's technical direction is consistent with the priorities of well-resourced, technically rigorous evaluation bodies, and participation often brings access to infrastructure, talent, and co-funding that materially reduce execution risk.

4. Team strength beyond academic origin

Quantum computing companies are, almost by definition, founded by exceptional scientists. The field demands deep expertise in physics, mathematics, and engineering, and the founding teams of most quantum startups include researchers with distinguished academic credentials. Despite this, at Series A and B, investors are looking for evidence that the team has evolved beyond its academic origins. The presence of experienced commercial leadership, individuals with track records in sales, business development, go-to-market strategy, and operational scaling, is a strong indicator that the company understands the difference between building impressive technology and building a sustainable business.

The most compelling teams are those where scientific excellence and commercial acumen co-exist, where the founders remain central to the company’s commercial and technical vision but have surrounded themselves with senior leaders who can close enterprise deals, build pipelines, alongside navigating technical and regulatory complexities.

Beyond the composition of the leadership team itself, investors pay close attention to a founder's ability to set and execute the right strategic roadmap, and to attract the calibre of talent needed to deliver against it. Quantum companies compete for a scarce pool of specialists, physicists, cryogenic engineers, quantum algorithm designers, and a founder's ability to recruit and retain these individuals is a direct reflection of the company's credibility within the field. 

Equally telling is the depth of the founder's connections to the broader quantum ecosystem: relationships with national laboratories, university research groups, standards bodies, and hardware or software partners. These links are not merely reputational, but also provide early access to emerging research, collaborative opportunities, and the kind of informal intelligence about where the field is heading that no market report can replicate. 

Values as an investment criteria

The four pillars above are, in a sense, table stakes, and describe what any rigorous quantum investor should evaluate. For Firgun Ventures, the assessment does not end there. The fund's investment philosophy is shaped by a set of core values that are deliberately applied to the companies we back.

Excellence, is non-negotiable. Firgun looks for teams that set the highest bar for themselves, the kind of founders and management team who treat "good enough" as a disqualifying phrase and who attract talent that holds itself to the same standard. However, excellence without execution is just ambition. Quantum hardware companies face decade-long development cycles, and what separates the companies that endure from those that stall is the discipline to build data-driven roadmaps and iterate relentlessly against them. A compelling vision presented at a conference is worth far less than a team that can show, quarter by quarter, that it is hitting the milestones it set for itself. 

Underpinning both of the above is integrity: putting team before self, acting with humility, and maintaining the highest ethical standards through the long and often gruelling journey from laboratory to commercialisation. In a field where timelines are measured in years and setbacks are inevitable, the character of the founding and management team is what determines whether a company can sustain the trust of its investors, its employees, and its customers when the road gets difficult.

The investment lens

The quantum sector is maturing rapidly, but it remains a domain where capital allocation requires unusual discipline. The companies that attract the most informed investment at Series A and B are those that can demonstrate all four pillars simultaneously (at minimum): validated, defensible technology; early customer pilots and/or real customers paying real money; a technically credible commercialisation roadmap; and a team equipped to execute on it. For a quantum-specialised fund like Firgun Ventures, these criteria are not a checklist to be mechanically applied but a framework for identifying the rare companies that have the potential to bridge the gap between scientific promise and commercial reality. In a sector where the funding funnel narrows sharply, these are the companies best positioned to emerge from the other side.