Q.ANT
TRUMPF-born Stuttgart company building photonic processors on thin-film lithium niobate that compute with light; its NPUs run at LRZ and Jülich and are heading into IONOS cloud data centres.
- Sector
- Optics & Photonics
- Headquarters
- Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg
- Founded
- 2018
- Ownership
- Private, venture-backed
- Known for
- Native Processing Unit (NPU)
- Website
- qant.com
- Topics
- photonic computing AI accelerator lithium niobate HPC TRUMPF
What they do
Q.ANT builds processors that perform mathematical operations with light instead of electrons. Its Native Processing Unit (NPU) is a photonic co-processor that plugs into standard servers via PCIe and sits alongside CPUs and GPUs, taking over the matrix operations that dominate AI and scientific computing. The chips are made from thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN), a crystal used in telecom modulators, on Q.ANT's own pilot line operated with the Stuttgart research institute IMS CHIPS.
Why it matters
Electricity is becoming the binding constraint on AI data centres. Q.ANT claims its approach targets up to 30 times better energy efficiency than conventional processors for equivalent matrix operations, measured at photonic circuit level; that is a company figure, not an independent system-level result. What is independently observable is deployment: the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre near Munich evaluated the second-generation NPU and reported a large throughput gain over the first generation, and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre also runs Q.ANT hardware. In May 2026 the German cloud provider IONOS announced it would offer Q.ANT's Native Processing Server to commercial customers, the first public cloud to do so. In June 2026 the company showed a diffusion image model and NXAI's TiRex forecasting model running on photonic hardware.
Products to know
- NPU 2 and the Native Processing Server: see our product profile.
- Earlier product lines in quantum sensing, particle metrology and atomic gyroscopes, which reflect the company's origins in quantum photonics.
The German angle
Q.ANT was founded in 2018 by Michael Förtsch inside the TRUMPF group, the Ditzingen laser and machine-tool maker, which remains an investor. That is an unusual origin: a family-owned Mittelstand champion incubating a deep-tech venture rather than a university. The company raised a Series A announced at 62 million euros in July 2025, co-led by Cherry Ventures, UVC Partners and imec.xpand with state development bank L-Bank participating, extended to 80 million US dollars in November 2025 when Stanley Druckenmiller's Duquesne Family Office joined.
Sources
Star products by Q.ANT
Stories
Why Germany's deep-tech founders cluster around Munich, Aachen and Dresden
Three cities produce a striking share of Germany's hardware start-ups. The reasons are older and more specific than talent alone, and the failures of Lilium and Volocopter show the limits.
Twelve German deep-tech startups building real hardware
Photonic processors, e-fuel plants, wildfire satellites, graphene chips and heat batteries: twelve young German companies whose products you can weigh, install or launch.
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Last reviewed 4 November 2026. Main source: www.newsfilecorp.com/release/259117/Q.ANT-Raises-62-Million-. Something out of date? Suggest a correction.