Delft Circuits, an EIC Accelerator Pick, and Quantum Cabling

Every qubit in a superconducting quantum computer needs wires that run from room-temperature electronics down to a chip cooled to a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Laboratories have done this with coaxial cables, one per line, each fitted with its own filters and attenuators. At a few dozen qubits that works. At thousands it fills the refrigerator, leaks heat and multiplies the points of failure. Delft Circuits, a Dutch company founded in 2017, replaces the bundle with thin, flat, superconducting flex cables that carry eight lines each and have the filters built in.

The European Innovation Council has backed that idea twice. In the October 2019 round of the EIC Accelerator pilot it selected CrioFlex, a grant-only project that received an EU contribution of €1,957,036. In the October 2024 round of the Horizon Europe EIC Accelerator it selected Tuxedo for blended finance, with a grant of €2,499,999. Seven years after the first award the company sells its cabling inside Bluefors and FormFactor systems and has raised €15 million in private capital. What the EU's own project record shows about the first grant is close to nothing.

Where Delft Circuits Stands Now

Delft Circuits is active and hiring. It filed a balance sheet for 2025 with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce in May 2026 and has patent publications from 2022, 2024 and 2026, according to North Data, which lists its address as Schieweg 15-A in Delft. A search of the insolvency register at faillissementsdossier.nl returns no proceedings against the company. The figures in its filed accounts sit behind North Data's paywall and could not be checked for this article.

The company is mid-way through a management change. In December 2025 it named Martin Danoesastro, who spent more than 25 years at Boston Consulting Group and holds a TU Delft master's in applied physics, as chief executive and announced an €8 million extension of its Series A, bringing total capital raised to €15 million, a figure also reported by Bits&Chips and The Quantum Insider. The co-founders Sal Jua Bosman and Daan Kuitenbrouwer moved to strategy, research and product roles. The release said preparations for a Series B in 2026 were under way; no Series B has been announced. In April 2026 Karen Keenan became chief operating officer, and her predecessor Maarten Hendriks moved to building a dedicated "Quantum Fab" in Delft, the company announced.

The Technology: Flat Cables Instead of Coax

Cri/oFlex is a polyimide film carrying silver or niobium-titanium striplines, 0.3 millimetres thin, with eight 50-ohm channels per flex and a frequency range up to 18 GHz, according to the company's technology page. Niobium-titanium becomes superconducting at cryogenic temperatures, so it carries signals with little loss and conducts little heat down into the coldest stage of the fridge. The difference from coax is what sits inside the cable: attenuators, low-pass filters and infrared filters are printed into the flex rather than screwed on per line and per temperature stage. The company says this gives "10× fewer points of failure" and a tenfold lower thermal load; those figures are its own.

The claims that matter most have outside support. In a September 2025 release published by Bluefors, the Helsinki-based dilution refrigerator maker that calls itself the world leader, its founder and interim chief executive Rob Blaauwgeers said the company's testing had confirmed that Cri/oFlex "delivers microwave performance on par with conventional coaxial solutions, while offering superior thermal performance". Bluefors now offers the cabling pre-installed and tested in its fridges, with up to 1,536 input or control lines in its XLDsl system, the same release says, and the companies say they have published a joint paper with measurements on real qubits.

Earlier in 2025 FormFactor, the Nasdaq-listed test equipment maker, agreed to integrate Cri/oFlex into its cryogenic test systems, raising capacity to 160 channels per port and 1,920 in total, according to the release carried by Stock Titan on 6 March 2025 and the company's copy. On 17 March 2025, at the APS Global Physics Summit, Delft Circuits launched a turnkey loader with 256 channels, enough for up to 64 qubits, which it says costs less than the closest high-density coax alternative of 168 channels.

What CrioFlex Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The European Commission's list of companies selected at the 9 October 2019 cut-off names Delft Circuits b.v. alone for CrioFlex, grant only, with no partner company. The grant agreement was signed on 14 February 2020, and the project ran from 1 March 2020 to 31 October 2022 at a total cost of €2,804,016.25, according to CORDIS.

The objective was specific. Delft Circuits, which said it had been selling precursor cabling products "since Q1 2019", would "develop in this project a solution for integrating microwave and thermal components in a monolithic cabling solution", supported by a network of validation partners, and take the product to technology readiness level 8, a qualified system ready for deployment. The context was the jump from processors of about 50 qubits to 1,000, for which coax was "inadequate".

The project's final periodic report, for March 2021 to October 2022, does not report what was done. Its three sections repeat the original objective almost word for word, still in the future tense: "We will develop in this project a solution". No deliverables, publications or results are listed. Whether the project finished on its original schedule cannot be checked either, because CORDIS shows only the final dates.

The public record outside CORDIS fills most of the gap. The products Delft Circuits sells today are the monolithic cabling CrioFlex described: flex lines with integrated attenuators and filters, sold as complete loaders and validated by Bluefors with real qubits.

1. Microwave components integrated into the flexDeliveredAttenuators, low-pass and IR filters built into Cri/oFlex, per the company and Bluefors.
2. Thermal performance in one monolithic cableDeliveredBluefors reports "superior thermal performance" against coax and describes a "monolithic design".
3. Product ready for deployment (TRL 8)DeliveredSold pre-installed in Bluefors fridges and integrated by FormFactor in 2025.
4. Validation and qualification partnersDeliveredJoint qubit measurements with Bluefors; OrangeQS publicly endorsed the 256-channel system.
5. Reporting of results to the EUThinThe final CORDIS report repeats the objective and lists no results.

On the evidence, CrioFlex delivered what it set out to build. The caveat is the timing: the validations and partnerships that prove it are from 2025, more than two years after the grant ended, so how much of the product existed in October 2022 is not documented.

Tuxedo: the Second Award

The Commission's list of companies selected at the October 2024 cut-off includes Delft Circuits B.V. for Tuxedo, with blended finance, one of 71 companies the EIC announced in February 2025 from 1,211 proposals. Bits&Chips listed it among the 11 Dutch winners.

Tuxedo is a Horizon Europe EIC Accelerator project under the 2024 challenge for emerging quantum technology components. It runs from 1 September 2025 to 31 August 2027 with an EU contribution of €2,499,999; CORDIS gives no total cost. It aims to build an interface between Cri/oFlex and superconducting printed circuit boards, because, the CORDIS summary argues, systems must scale "from 100+ qubits now to 10k qubits in a few years", and every extra connector adds cost and failure points. The company's roadmap of September 2025 lists "direct flex-to-PCB and chip interfaces" among its next steps. The project is just over a year in and has published no report, so it is too early to judge.

The Money and the Other EU Projects

The first private round came a year after CrioFlex ended. In September 2023 DeepTechXL, a Dutch fund backed by ASML, Philips and the PME pension fund, put €5 million into a €6.3 million Series A alongside existing investors including High-Tech Gründerfonds, according to HTGF, which also named NASA among the company's customers. Nordic9 dates the round to 30 August 2023 and adds Scholt Group and QuVest Capital as investors. The December 2025 extension added €8 million from DeepTechXL, HTGF and QuVest, with Singapore's Paeonia Group and Waves Capital Partners as new investors, as Quantum Computing Report also reported.

Delft Circuits has also been a partner in EU research consortia. It received €200,000 in AVaQus, a FET-Open project for a coherent quantum annealer that ran from October 2020 to September 2024, and €299,630.63 in MATQu, a project from June 2021 to May 2024 to build a European supply chain for qubit materials. In 2025 it started HAVIK, an EU co-funded project with QuantWare and Qblox to push two-qubit gate fidelity above 99%, in which its share is better thermalisation of the cabling, the company says; HAVIK's funding programme and amount are not stated there.

Revenue, profit and headcount from the filed accounts are not public without a paid subscription. The only staff figure is the company's own "50+ people, 20+ nationalities" on its website. The company says it has delivered "hundreds of I/O modules", a claim no third party has quantified.

Why Europe Should Care

Cryogenic wiring is a small part of a quantum computer's cost, but no superconducting machine works without it, and Bluefors, the fridge maker that now sells Delft Circuits' cabling, is based in Helsinki. In July 2025 the Commission adopted a strategy to make the EU a global leader in quantum technology by 2030, citing tech sovereignty and security, and announced a Quantum Act. The European Parliament's legislative tracker lists that act, meant to strengthen industrial capacity and "the security and resilience of quantum supply chains", as announced for the second quarter of 2026 but not yet proposed as of September 2026. A Delft supplier of a component every superconducting quantum computer needs, building its own fab, fits that aim closely; the Tuxedo award was made under a challenge for exactly such components.

The Verdict

Delft Circuits has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.