Q.ANT raises €62 million to transform the future of computing with photonic processing

Stuttgart, Germany – July 17, 2025 – Q.ANT, a pioneer in photonic processing, today announced a €62 million Series A financing round to accelerate the commercialization of its energy-efficient photonic processors for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC). The round is co-led by Cherry Ventures, UVC Partners, and imec.xpand, with participation from additional DeepTech investors, including L-Bank, Verve Ventures, Grazia Equity, EXF Alpha, LEA Partners, Onsight Ventures, and TRUMPF. This investment ranks among Europe’s most significant deep tech funding rounds, laying the foundation for a fundamental shift in how AI is computed.

As AI infrastructure scales globally, traditional chip technology (CMOS) reaches its physical limits, performance stagnates, and electricity demand is reaching untenable levels. A report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that by 2026, data center energy use is expected to surpass the entire annual electricity consumption of Japan^[1]. Q.ANT is addressing this issue with a radically different paradigm: computing with light instead of electricity, which opens the door to significantly higher performance and energy savings.

From European Research Roots to Global Impact 

In just five years, Q.ANT has brought to maturity what experts have pursued for decades: the world’s first commercial photonic processor for real-world AI and HPC workloads– executing complex AI operations much faster while saving significant amounts of energy. Built on Thin-Film Lithium Niobate (TFLN), the Q.ANT Native Processing Server integrates seamlessly into today’s data centers as a plug-in co-processor. Real-world tests promise up to 30 times energy efficiency, 50 times performance improvement, and the potential to increase data center capacity by 100 times – all without the need for complex active cooling systems. Q.ANT is the industry’s first photonic processing company to offer this level of performance, accuracy, and industry integration in one sustainable solution. 

“Q.ANT was founded with a bold vision: to redefine the way the world computes by using light instead of electricity,” said Dr. Michael Förtsch, founder and CEO of Q.ANT. “This investment proves that Europe has both the ambition and the capital to lead – and gives us the strong partners we need to pursue our mission and help shape the future of computing.” Q.ANT was founded by Michael Förtsch as a spin-off from TRUMPF in 2018, developing independently light-based data processing.

Strategic Alliance for International Expansion

This funding will enable Q.ANT to scale production, advance development of next-generation photonic processors, grow its team across disciplines, and expand to the US to support a growing number of customer deployments. In addition, Q.ANT strengthens its advisory board with two semiconductor and photonics experts: Hermann Hauser, founder of ARM and Hermann Eul former member of the Infineon Management Board and former CVP & GM of Intel. 

"What impressed us about Q.ANT was the clarity of its vision and its ability to consistently deliver on it,” said Andreas Unseld, General Partner at UVC Partners. “Q.ANT is not only pioneering a new computing architecture, but doing so in a way that addresses the urgent need for more sustainable AI infrastructure. That combination of deep tech capability and long-term relevance made this an easy decision for us.”  

“Q.ANT’s photonic chips stand to radically reduce data center operating costs while delivering the breakthrough performance demanded by next-generation AI and high-performance computing,” said Christian Meermann, Founding Partner at Cherry Ventures. “With early commercial momentum and a world-class team of DeepTech experts, Q.ANT is uniquely positioned to redefine the trillion-dollar data center semiconductor landscape. We’re proud to back them in building the future of computing.”

“Classical CMOS processors are approaching their physical and architectural limits – where further gains through parallelization and smaller structures yield only marginal improvements. In contrast, photonic computing represents a fundamentally new paradigm with immense, largely untapped scaling potential. Q.ANT has solved the core challenges of this technology and is well-positioned to define the future of high-performance computing,” said Cyril Vancura, Partner at imec.xpand.

UVC Partners Investment Manager, Marc Alexander Kühn, said: "Q.ANT is an extraordinary example of how Europe's industrial heritage, with companies like Trumpf, accelerates innovation and supports highly impactful topics to become global frontrunners. Michael and the whole Q.ANT team are on a highly meaningful mission for Europe's economy and sovereignty."

Future made tangible – Native processing server ready for data center integration

Q.ANT is on a mission to redefine the future of AI infrastructure. By 2030, the company aims to make its photonic processing technology a foundational pillar of global AI systems, radically enhancing scalability and energy efficiency. With a focus on seamless market integration, Q.ANT’s Photonic Native Processing Server (NPS) is now available for early access evaluation and delivered in an easy-to-deploy, industry-standard format that is natively compatible with today’s programming languages and AI software ecosystems. The Q.ANT NPS uses less energy, eliminates on-chip heat, and delivers higher compute density, paving the way for a new era of high-performance, sustainable computing.

[1] https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/6b2fd954-2017-408e-bf08-952fdd62118a/Electricity2024-Analysisandforecastto2026.pdf

About Q.ANT 

Q.ANT is a photonic DeepTech scale-up developing photonic processing solutions that compute natively with light and deliver a scalable alternative to transistor-based systems. Its Light Empowered Native Arithmetics (LENA) architecture delivers analog co-processing power optimized for complex computation and enabling energy-efficient performance for next-generation AI and HPC applications. Q.ANT operates its own Thin-Film Lithium Niobate (TFLN) chip pilot line in collaboration with IMS CHIPS and is currently shipping its Native Processing Servers to selected partners. Q.ANT was founded by Michael Förtsch in 2018 and is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany.  

About UVC Partners

UVC Partners is a leading venture capital firm that invests in European B2B tech startups and has offices in Munich and Berlin. With more than €600 million in assets under management, the VC typically invests between €1 to €10 million initially and up to €30 million per startup in the areas of DeepTech, ClimateTech, Mobility, and Software/AI. As an independent partner of UnternehmerTUM, Europe's leading startup hub, UVC Partners has unique access to proprietary deal flow, more than 1,000 corporates and SMEs, as well as to talents from the Technical University of Munich, which belongs to the best European technical universities. UVC Partners' investment portfolio includes Flix, Isar Aerospace, planqc, Proxima Fusion, Reverion, Tacto, TWAICE, DeepDrive, STABL, and many more. All portfolio companies and founders benefit from the team's extensive investment and exit experience, their ability to build sustainable category leaders, and the network of UnternehmerTUM enabling them to speed up market entry.  

Learn more at www.uvcpartners.com.