Here are the four firms feds back with $92M quantum investment

Last month, the federal government launched the first phase of the Canadian Quantum Champions Program (CQCP). The $92 million investment is part of a $334.3 million commitment to Canada's quantum ecosystem announced in Budget 2025. The government has also classified this investment as part of its commitment to spend two per cent of Canadian GDP on defence.

The program is providing up to $23 million to four Canadian quantum tech companies. Anyon Systems, Nord Quantique, Photonic, and Xanadu Quantum Technologies were selected for the program.

"Quantum technologies - computing, sensing and communications - are now understood as strategic infrastructure that will underpin economic competitiveness and national security for decades to come. The Canadian Quantum Champions Program is designed to ensure that Canada translates its early leadership in quantum computing into scalable, sovereign capability with long-term value. This is about not merely inventing the future but also building it here, in Canada," said Lisa Lambert, CEO of Quantum Industry Canada.

Xanadu Quantum Technologies

Founded in 2016, Xanadu has become one of Canada's newsstream spotlights, making huge strides in Canadian-built quantum computing, with funding reported at USD $275 million from investors such as OMERS, Golden Venture, and the Business Development Bank of Canada.

CEO Christian Weedbrook started the company at the University of Toronto's Creative Destruction Lab accelerator program. For the past decade, the company has been developing cloud-accessible photonic computers. 

Xanadu has built a modular quantum computer known as Aurora. The system uses interconnected photonic modules and operates at room temperature, a distinct approach compared to many other qubit platforms.

In June 2025, the company opened a CAD $10 million advanced photonic packaging facility in Toronto. The site produces ultra-low-loss photonic components and is available to external partners as part of a broader national supply-chain effort.

Xanadu is currently working with materials engineering solutions firm Applied Materials to develop a high-volume manufacturing process for superconducting transition-edge sensors, a key component of its photonic detector systems.

Photonic

Photonic, a Vancouver-based company founded in 2016, is advancing a distributed architecture it says is designed for fault-tolerant and scalable quantum computing. The company's strategy centres on integrating computing, communications and memory functions in a single qubit platform.

Photonic states that its architecture prioritises entanglement distribution across nodes to support large-scale quantum operations and error correction. It uses silicon-based spin qubits with optical interconnects to link processing units across modules and networks.

The company has expanded its global footprint with operations in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. It has raised significant capital to support development, including CAD $180 million in its latest funding round announced earlier this month.

Nord Quantique

Nord Quantique, a Sherbrooke-based firm, is advancing its efforts to develop error-corrected quantum computing systems for fault-tolerant performance in industrial applications.

The firm aims to scale its architecture to deliver larger logical qubit systems that could be integrated into data-centre environments. Its development path includes achieving milestones such as first demonstrations of logical qubits from single physical qubits and hardware-efficient error-correction codes.

In November of last year, Nord Quantique was invited to participate in Stage B of the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, which involves a contracted research project valued at USD $5 million, with the potential to extend to USD $15 million.

Anyon Systems

Anyon Systems, a Montreal-based firm founded in 2014, continues to develop an integrated hardware and software stack for superconducting quantum computers aimed at both research and industrial use.

Anyon's Qube system is an all-in-one superconducting quantum computer intended to integrate with existing high-performance computing centres and to enable incremental upgrades as chip technology evolves. The firm also provides Snowflurry, an open-source software library for defining and running quantum circuits on simulators or hardware.

The company has delivered integrated quantum systems to government and research bodies, including Canada's Department of National Defence.

Anyon is an anchor partner in the development of a new industrial quantum fabrication facility in Bromont, Québec, collaborating on nanofabrication and 3D packaging processes for superconducting chips.