Sparrow Quantum: How the EIC Accelerator Lit a Single-Photon Chip

Photonic quantum computers and quantum networks run on single particles of light, and producing exactly one photon when you ask for it is hard. Most laboratories still make them by chance, firing a laser into a crystal and hoping. Sparrow Quantum, a spin-out from Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute, sells a semiconductor chip that emits them on demand.

In 2021 the company had two employees. That year the European Innovation Council awarded it €2,490,742.63 to turn its chip into products. "Without the initial EIC Accelerator, there would be no Sparrow Quantum today," chief executive Kurt Stokbro told the EU's Deepsync platform in 2025. Four years later it has more than fifty staff, tens of millions of euros from private investors, and a second EIC grant.

What Sparrow Quantum Sells Today

Sparrow sells single photons in two forms. Sparrow Core is the chip itself, a quantum dot embedded in a nanostructured semiconductor that releases one photon each time it is excited. Sparrow Nest, launched in November 2025, packages the chip, its optics and its cooling into a rack-mounted system that customers can install without building a quantum optics lab around it. Stokbro called it "exactly what the quantum ecosystem has been asking for".

The buyers so far are research groups and quantum computer builders. The University of Vienna has bought chips for its research, and the UK's National Quantum Computing Centre received a first prototype in 2025 for its testbed, according to Deepsync. The QTOOL report on CORDIS names ORCA Computing, a British photonic quantum computing company, as the recipient of a complete system.

The Technology: One Photon at a Time

A photonic quantum computer encodes information in photons and makes them interfere. For that to work, each photon must be identical to the others and must arrive when the machine expects it. Conventional sources, which split laser photons in a nonlinear crystal, produce them at random and usually in pairs, so machines built on them waste most of their attempts.

Sparrow's source is a quantum dot, a nanometre-scale island of semiconductor that behaves like an artificial atom, placed inside a photonic waveguide that channels its light into a fibre. Excite the dot and it emits exactly one photon. The company's claim is that its chips combine high efficiency, purity and indistinguishability, the three properties that decide whether a source is usable at scale. QPAIR, its second EIC project, aims to extend the approach to entangled photon pairs produced on demand.

What QTOOL Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

QTOOL ran from 1 April 2022 to 30 September 2024 under the 2021 challenge for Strategic Digital and Health Technologies. It set out to industrialise four products: a single-photon chip, a fibre-coupled plug-and-play device, a complete turnkey source and a conversion module for telecom wavelengths. The closing report is specific about what was done.

1. Free-space single-photon chipDelivered"Sold and installed in several European labs", per CORDIS.
2. Fibre-coupled chipDeliveredIn-house fibre gluing developed, which CORDIS says "significantly" improved usability.
3. Turnkey plug-and-play systemDeliveredA rack-mounted system delivered to ORCA Computing; commercial launch as Sparrow Nest in November 2025.
4. Telecom-band (O-band) systemLateStill in development at project close, with launch expected in 2025; no launch announced since.

Three of four products, one of them already in a quantum computing company's hands, is a strong result for a 30-month project in a field where many start-ups never ship hardware. The telecom-wavelength product, which matters most for quantum networks over existing fibre, is the gap.

What Sparrow Quantum Has Achieved Since the Award

The private money followed the grant. Deepsync reports a €4 million seed round within a year of the award. In April 2025 Sparrow announced a €21.5 million Series A led by PensionDanmark with EIFO and Novo Holdings, which Deepsync says included €5 million of EIC matching equity. In December 2025 it announced €27.5 million, which it called Scandinavia's largest quantum technology investment, from North Ventures, Scale Capital and LIFTT EuroInvest, a vehicle backed by the European Investment Bank. Neither announcement makes clear whether the second figure includes the first. In August 2026 the EU's EuroHPC Joint Undertaking selected Sparrow as one of 13 companies in its Quantum Grand Challenge, with €300,000 for a project, EU-SCALE, to plan how its chips could be built into a larger photonic quantum computer.

The team grew even faster. Deepsync puts the headcount at two when QTOOL began and more than 40 by late 2025. The 2025 accounts report 55 employees according to ownr and 66 according to Proff.

The Money

The 2025 accounts, reported by Proff and ownr, show a company built for a long runway. Equity stood at DKK 198.1 million against total assets of DKK 237.9 million. The pre-tax loss was DKK 22.8 million and the net loss DKK 17.5 million after a tax credit. Gross profit, the closest public measure of sales, was DKK 7.6 million.

Why Europe Should Care

Few EIC beneficiaries fit EU policy as closely. On 2 July 2025 the Commission adopted its Quantum Europe Strategy, which aims to make the EU a global leader in quantum by 2030, with pilot lines for quantum chips and an emphasis on supply-chain security, and it has since called for evidence on a European Quantum Act. A European supplier of the light sources that photonic quantum machines need is exactly the kind of component that strategy wants to keep in Europe.

The investor list makes the same point. A Danish pension fund, Denmark's export and investment fund, the EIC Fund and an EIB-backed vehicle all hold stakes. Sparrow is, in effect, a publicly backed European bet on a supply chain that does not exist yet.

The Verdict

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