Quantum Funding, Quantum Software

EMode Photonix gets $1 million to speed up quantum light design

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October 19, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

EMode Photonix secured $1 million in a pre-seed round led by Ground State Ventures, with participation from Harlow Capital Management to accelerate development of its quantum photonics software. The Boulder-based company builds simulation tools for photonic integrated circuits, claiming its stack models nonlinear circuits 1,000 times faster than current methods, EMode Photonix says. This technology supports multiple quantum computing approaches by enabling engineers to design devices that manipulate light for precise frequencies.

“Our software lets engineers design the nonlinear devices that shift light to exactly the frequencies these systems require,” said CEO Eric Stanton. The funding will support product development and expanded sales efforts.

EMode Photonix Secures $1 Million Pre-Seed Funding Round

The company intends to build an enterprise offering capable of completing a photonic integrated circuit design in a single day, a significant reduction from current timelines. This accelerated design process addresses a critical bottleneck in the development of advanced photonic devices, particularly those used in quantum technologies. EMode has already begun generating revenue through sales to research laboratories, demonstrating early market validation of its approach, according to EMode Photonix.

Jessi Olsen, EQ CEO, highlighted the broader impact of this investment, stating, “EMode is building critical tools that accelerate the design and development of next-generation photonic technologies, and we’re thrilled to see investors backing their vision.” Olsen further emphasized the importance of this funding for regional economic growth, adding, “This is exactly the kind of company formation and investment momentum we want to see as we work to build the world’s leading quantum economy here in the Mountain West.” The funding will support both continued product refinement and an expansion of EMode Photonix’s sales efforts.

Our software lets engineers design the nonlinear devices that shift light to exactly the frequencies these systems require.

CEO Eric Stanton, who co-founded the company with Maiya Stanton
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Photonic Circuits quantum photonics
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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