Qblox's Quantum Control Since the EIC Accelerator: 100+ Customers

A quantum computer is surrounded by ordinary electronics. Every qubit has to be driven by precisely shaped microwave or radio-frequency pulses and read out within nanoseconds, and the racks that do this are a market of their own. Qblox, a Delft spin-out from the quantum institute QuTech founded in 2018, builds those racks. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's October 2020 cut-off it was selected with blended finance, grant plus equity, to scale them up to 1,600 qubits with error correction, according to the European Commission's list of selected companies, which names Qblox of Delft as the project's only beneficiary.

The grant itself was €2,481,937.50 towards a total cost of €3,545,625, for a project that ran from 1 March 2021 to 30 November 2023, according to CORDIS. Six years after selection, Qblox is a supplier to more than one hundred customers, has a US subsidiary and a US production line, and has been picked by the US Department of Energy to commercialise a national-laboratory control platform. What it has not done is launch the 1,600-qubit system it described to the EIC.

What Qblox Does Now

Qblox is active and growing. Its newsroom lists 16 items for 2026 up to October. In March 2026 it said it would manufacture its control systems in the United States, with products shipping from a facility in Canton, Massachusetts, from 1 April and production handled by Prodrive Technologies, a manufacturer that also has Dutch roots, according to The Quantum Insider and Quantum Computing Report. Both reports tie the move to US federal procurement and Department of Energy funding rules.

That follows a November 2025 announcement by the US Department of Energy that Fermilab and Qblox would manufacture and distribute the Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit (QICK), Fermilab's open-source control platform, in the United States. The arrangement started as a letter of intent, with a cooperative research agreement and licensing to follow, according to The Quantum Insider and Quantum Computing Report. Whether that agreement has been signed could not be verified; Qblox's newsroom lists a further DOE, Fermilab and Qblox item on 24 June 2026, but its text was not available.

The US push rests on a subsidiary, Qblox Inc., set up in Boston in March 2025 for sales, customer support and partnerships and led by general manager Gregg Carman, according to YES!Delft. The Boston office opened in June 2025, Evertiq reported.

The Technology: Racks That Talk to Qubits

"Every qubit, regardless of modality, must be told what to do," as an industry overview by PostQuantum puts it. The control electronics turn a quantum program into analogue pulses, read back the qubits' response and, for error correction, must react to measurement results fast enough to correct errors before they pile up. Laboratories once assembled this from general-purpose signal generators and digitisers. Integrated control stacks combine pulse generation, readout and timing in one system.

Qblox's version is the Cluster, a modular chassis filled with control modules (QCM, up to 400 MHz), readout modules (QRM), radio-frequency modules covering 2 to 18.5 GHz and modules for timetagging and DC sources, according to the company's product page. Its EIC application named four innovations: a protocol called SYNQ that synchronises modules "with nanosecond precision", a protocol called LINQ that distributes information across the system "in less than 200 ns", pulse generators with noise "4x lower than the best alternative", and a hardware module for decoding errors, according to CORDIS. The noise comparison is the company's own claim and was not independently verified.

The market is contested. PostQuantum names four companies that "dominate the Western market": Zurich Instruments, owned by Rohde & Schwarz since 2021, Qblox, Israel's Quantum Machines and the listed US group Keysight. It describes Qblox as the control electronics standard for open-architecture quantum computers, systems assembled from components of different suppliers. No market-share figures were found to test that.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The application promised three things on a timetable. In the following two years Qblox would deliver 5 to 20-qubit control stacks to companies and research centres. It would develop the Supercluster, "a modular 1,600 qubit quantum control stack with error correction capabilities". And "from 2023, we will offer our fully modular solution with error-correction capabilities", according to the project objective.

The final periodic report, covering March 2022 to November 2023, says Qblox "has been prototyping the key new hardware elements for project supercluster". It reports multi-device synchronisation "down to femtoseconds" for hundreds of channels, signal drift cut to "a few parts per million", a compiler upgraded for control beyond one Cluster with experiments running up to 230 times faster, two prototype boards for denser modules, and a decoder module that decoded a surface code "in less than 500 ns". It says the technology was "used by world leaders in quantum technology in over 100 academic and industrial labs" and lists one image caption as "SuperCluster setup with 1600 channels". The report counts channels, not qubits, and does not claim that a 1,600-qubit product was finished or put on sale.

1. 5 to 20-qubit control stacks for companies and research centresDeliveredMore than 100 labs per the CORDIS report; more than 100 customers at the 2024 Series A per Tech.eu.
2. Low-noise, synchronised hardware and a compiler for multi-Cluster systemsDeliveredDrift, synchronisation and 230x speed-up reported on CORDIS; these are the company's own measurements.
3. Error-decoding hardware modulePartly deliveredSurface-code decoding under 500 ns demonstrated in the project. The error-correction offer announced since uses Riverlane's Deltaflow decoder, and the full loop has so far run on emulated qubit data.
4. Modular solution with error correction on offer from 2023LateIntegration with Riverlane announced in March 2026, about two and a half years after the date in the application.
5. Supercluster: a 1,600-qubit control stackNot achievedPrototype elements and a 1,600-channel setup shown; no 1,600-qubit product has been announced. Third-party coverage describes the Cluster as supporting "hundreds of qubits".

The project closed on schedule and its core business goal, getting control stacks into laboratories, was met. The headline target was not. The phrase "hundreds of qubits" comes from Quantum Computing Report's description of the Cluster in March 2026, and no public system built with Qblox electronics at the 1,600-qubit scale was found.

What Qblox Has Achieved Since the Award

The equity part of the blended award shows up in the company's first funding round. In June 2024 Qblox announced a $26 million Series A led by Quantonation and the Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, with QDNL Participations and the European Innovation Council taking part, according to Tech.eu and The Quantum Insider. Chief executive Niels Bultink called it the company's first equity investment and said Qblox had grown mainly on revenue. Silicon Canals converted the round to about €24.2 million, while Bits&Chips reported it as €26 million; the press releases give dollars. Qblox appears on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, on a profile page titled after the 2020 project, but the size of the EIC's stake is not public.

The partnerships since then sit where the EIC project pointed: error correction and large systems. In October 2025 Qblox said it was integrating NVIDIA's NVQLink with its Q1 pulse processors to link GPUs to quantum hardware, according to its announcement. In March 2026 it and the British decoder company Riverlane announced that Riverlane's Deltaflow 2 decoder was integrated with Qblox control hardware, a combination they said reaches 250 physical qubits and one logical qubit, according to a PR Newswire release. In September 2026 the two companies timed the full correction loop at 6.886 microseconds at code distance 3 (Surface-17) and 11.886 microseconds at distance 9 (Surface-161), but with "emulated qubit measurements" and "no live qubits", according to an analysis by PostQuantum.

Qblox has also kept winning EU research money. Besides the EIC project, CORDIS lists it in six collaborative projects with a combined net EU contribution to Qblox of €6,674,888.75: the two phases of the Quantum Internet Alliance (€2,290,000 for phase 1 and €1,638,513.75 for phase 2, which started in April 2026), QLSI2 on semiconductor-based quantum computers (€791,000), FERROMON on superconducting qubits (€763,750), SCALLOP on scalable quantum hardware (€600,125) and ARCTIC on cryogenic technologies for computing (€591,500). North Data lists the same projects and, in addition, Dutch state aid between 2024 and 2026.

The Money

Qblox files abridged Dutch accounts, which show a balance sheet but no revenue or profit. The figures, as read from the filings by Liza, show equity of €45,720 at the end of 2021 and €91,772 at the end of 2022. At the end of 2023, the year the EIC project closed, equity was minus €1,548,683, with debts of €8,553,057 against a balance sheet total of €7,004,374. After the Series A, equity at the end of 2024 was €16,112,525 on a balance sheet total of €19,402,721. North Data confirms that balance sheets for 2022, 2023 and 2024 were filed, the last on 4 December 2025, but shows the figures only to subscribers, so Liza is the only open source for the numbers. The register-derived staff counts on Liza (15 in 2021, 30 in 2022 and zero for 2023 and 2024) conflict with the press figures and are not used here.

The pattern is that of a hardware company that grew on sales and grants until it outran its balance sheet. Negative equity at the end of 2023 meant liabilities exceeded assets, and the 2024 round more than cleared that gap. No accounts for 2025 had been found by October 2026.

Why Europe Should Care

On 2 July 2025 the Commission adopted its Quantum Europe Strategy, which aims to make Europe "a global leader in quantum technology by 2030" in the name of competitiveness, technological sovereignty and security, with six quantum chip pilot lines and a quantum act proposal expected in 2026. Control electronics are a layer every quantum computer needs, whatever its qubit type. Of the four suppliers PostQuantum names as dominant in the West, two are European: Qblox and the Swiss company Zurich Instruments.

Qblox's own path complicates the sovereignty story. A company built on a Dutch research institute, EU grants and Dutch and EU public equity now manufactures in Massachusetts to meet US procurement rules and runs a US Department of Energy commercialisation project. Its CEO said the Fermilab work would help "strengthen America's quantum infrastructure", The Quantum Insider reported. That is a commercial success for a European supplier, and also a sign that the largest public buyers of quantum hardware are not in Europe.

The Verdict

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