Welcome to the first TQDR newsletter, brought to you by Overmoro - a weekly newsletter bringing you all the recent must-know updates and developments in quantum technology adoption. We'll be bringing our own insights, expert analysis, and even a few fun bits along the way.
Today is also the public launch of Overmoro as a company. Overmoro’s mission is to enable technology leaders to adopt Quantum Technology smarter and faster through the best research, data, and insights across government and organisational strategy and policy.
You can read more about our plans at the bottom of this newsletter, let’s get into what is happening in the Quantum world:
The Big Stories
Governments continue to invest heavily in Quantum
On Thursday, May 21st, the US Department of Commerce awarded $2Bn in funding and took equity stakes in 9 companies to accelerate U.S. leadership in Quantum Computing. The US, who has already committed at least $4Bn previously through the National Quantum Initiative Act, will be awarding half this new funding to IBM for the establishment of a new quantum foundry subsidiary.
The very next day, French President Emmanuel Macron announced an additional €1Bn towards France’s National Quantum Strategy (and €550m state funding towards semiconductors) bringing their total committed quantum funding to date to around €3.3Bn. In his announcement he emphasised the importance of European investment to keep up with the US and China — no doubt after seeing the two countries take an unassailable lead in the AI race over the last few years.
This continues a trend of increased investment by governments, particularly in Europe, where there's a growing sense that European countries can not only compete in the quantum race but lead it. Governments worldwide have now publicly committed over an estimated $65Bn towards Quantum Technology.
Since the first coordinated national quantum strategy from the UK in 2014, 32 other countries have dedicated money and resources towards developing national quantum strategies and capabilities.
The picture of investment and commitment is not as clear as headline numbers suggest. We’ll be releasing a new report in the next few weeks breaking down the details of national investment, what each country’s focus is, and who is leading the way.
This is a trend that we expect only to grow as governments look to prepare for a quantum future. Many governments and organisations were unprepared for the technological shift that Covid and AI brought to the world, and they don’t plan on making the same mistake again.
Like a moth to a game
On Friday, technology company Moth released their open-access game Quantum Backrooms to the general public. Billed as the world’s first quantum consumer product, the motivation behind the game (and the company) is to engage users and consumers with quantum without needing to understand the technical details — much like how ChatGPT made AI accessible to millions worldwide in 2022.
A real horror experience, you’ll fly through the maze, disorientated, only to come face to face with the entities.
Quantum Backrooms sees the player descend through increasingly difficult levels of quantum generated mazes that change as you observe them, disorienting the player as they look to find the next way down before their sanity bar drops to 0. We enjoyed spending a Friday morning playing through story mode and soon found ourselves engrossed and frustrated as the world changes around you, stopping you in your tracks.
This feels like a fun way to experience quantum that a non-technical member of the public could genuinely engage with to start to understand the quantum picture. As we continue on the journey towards the inevitable Quantum ChatGPT moment, we look forward to seeing how companies will continue creative and interesting ways to use quantum computing technology.
Some fun quantum game history for you - while this might be dubbed as the first quantum consumer product, it is not the first game developed for a quantum computer. That honour probably goes to Moth’s very own Chief Science Officer Dr James Wootton for Cat/Box/Scissors. A quantum version of rock paper scissors built for quantum hardware developed all the way back in 2017.
Quantinuum IPO
Quantinuum, the world’s largest integrated quantum company, is due to IPO on Thursday this week at a valuation of around $13Bn - more than six times IonQ’s 2021 valuation of $2Bn. This comes after a $600M series B investment round announced in September 2025 that saw Nvidia join other industry investors such as JPMC and Amgen who had invested previously.
As highlighted earlier in this newsletter, Quantinuum is also one of the 9 companies that the US government has invested $100m towards in exchange for equity. Quantinuum, like other quantum companies, is still heavy in its investment and growth period with the company’s losses growing to $192.6m in 2025 in an effort to reach commercialisation.
Optimism is high across the quantum market though, and Quantinuum continues to form meaningful industry partnerships, with a recent expansion of its BMW collaboration on using quantum computing for advanced materials science. This is the most recent announcement in a list that includes banking technology leaders JPMorganChase, and Japan’s newest largest company SoftBank.
The Quick Reads
Each week we’ll also share a longer list of interesting things that are going on, more technical bits to get your teeth into, and links for further reading.
King’s College London scientists become the first UK academic team to have access to Google’s Willow chip, as announced by the National Quantum Computing Centre last week.
In an SEC filing on Thursday, IBM unveiled it had deployed over 90 quantum systems - more than all other reported industry players combined. This came alongside the announcement that they would be investing $10Bn over the next 5 years to advance their leadership position in quantum.
On May 22nd Alice & Bob, a leading French quantum startup, announced an expansion of their €100m Series B funding round to include NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm.
D-Wave is hosting its first ever Investor Day today, June 1st. Themed “The D-Wave Difference”, the recently US Government backed company will go into details about the company’s product roadmap and their plans for commercialisation.
Want to know the full details behind how to build a quantum computer? Well, Marin Ivezic, CEO of Applied Quantum, has the 14 part deep dive series for you. Filled with incredible detail, timelines and technical diagrams - this is not one for the faint of heart.
The Qutebits
We’ll be ending our newsletter with the fun, cute bits of quantum news - the Qutebits (see what we did there?).
What we’ve been reading - Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics by Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert.
This is part of the impossible journey to find a popular quantum science book you can share with your family and friends to understand what you do. Our view is that this book covers a lot of content and has a great hook, but ultimately doesn’t quite hit the accessibility goal it was aiming for.
We love to see a popular science book bring in the history and all the characters, but the level of technical concepts, even in the first couple of chapters, is going to be a challenge for those without a maths or physics background.
What to watch - Project Chapel, a free documentary from PBS about the installation of a quantum computer inside a university chapel. It offers a real juxtaposition between ground breaking technology and a traditional setting, and is filled with both technical staff and laypeople discussing the excitement and uncertainty around quantum computing.
What to listen to - Enjoyed Heated Rivalry? Well Universal Quantum’s new podcast episode makes the pitch for a historically inaccurate romance TV show between Schrödinger and Heisenberg. Despite the lack of historical evidence, the actual backstory behind the Schrödinger equation and matrix mechanics ends up surprisingly spicy. Check out the episode here - The Quantum Rivalry of Schrödinger & Heisenberg by The Quantum Frontier podcast.
And that’s all the news for this week - we’ll see you again next Monday.
Over the coming months we'll release our first benchmark — the National Quantum Index. It will be the first comprehensive ranking of global quantum adoption, and it will show, clearly, which countries are leading and which are catching up.
In the meantime, we're publishing regular insights and opening early access to our intelligence platform. This newsletter is the best way to follow the stories that matter and our analysis of them. Subscribe, get in touch, and let's talk quantum.