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Xanadu wins up to $10 million more from DARPA for quantum R&D

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October 19, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Xanadu Quantum Technologies has secured up to USD $10 million in additional funding from DARPA, indicating continued confidence in the company’s photonic approach to quantum computing after initial investment. This new contract extends DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative support for one year, allowing Xanadu to accelerate its research and development roadmap. The company’s Aurora photonic quantum computer demonstrates networkability, a key feature Xanadu believes establishes a foundation for all future fault-tolerant quantum systems, the company says. Unlike many quantum systems, Xanadu’s architecture operates at room temperature, potentially reducing costs and logistical challenges.

DARPA Extends Xanadu Funding to $10 Million for Quantum R&D

The QBI program evaluates quantum computing architectures for scalability and cost-effectiveness within realistic timelines, showing DARPA’s focus on practical utility. This advantage, combined with fast clock speeds and a modular design, positions Xanadu as a contender in the evolving quantum field. The company intends to allocate the majority of the funding directly to advancing its R&D efforts, with an eye toward applications across multiple sectors, according to Xanadu.

Dr. Christian Weedbrook, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xanadu, said that ongoing participation in QBI reinforces Xanadu’s goal of developing quantum computing solutions that deliver practical value across industries, including drug discovery, advanced chemistry, aerospace, defense and AI. Successful completion of Stage B evaluations keeps Xanadu on track for formal verification and validation within the DARPA QBI program, ensuring the computer can be built and operated as designed.

Ongoing participation in QBI reinforces Xanadu’s goal of developing quantum computing solutions that deliver practical value across industries, including drug discovery, advanced chemistry, aerospace, defense, and AI.

Dr. Christian Weedbrook, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Xanadu
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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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