The UK's quantum scale up opportunity

Read this guest blog by Nick Smallwood from Mills & Reeve LLP for Tech and Innovation Focus Week 2026.

In October 2025, LinkedIn’s data science team published a report on the quantum technology workforce. It contained the following graph, showing the number of quantum computing companies founded every year since 2016:

They say a picture is worth a thousand words and this is a case in point. Academic research is translating into new businesses at a rate of knots, with many of those companies based in the UK. According to recent research, the UK is home to the second largest number of quantum companies in the world (after the United States). The key challenge for the UK is providing start-ups with access to support to manage the challenging “valley of death” stage of commercialisation, where companies are pre-revenue and products are still in development. The UK National Quantum Technologies Programme (NQTP) has been fulfilling this role, building an industry led “Challenge Fund” to catalyse company involvement, using collaborative grants, procurement, and early-stage equity investment. The UK is in a strong position to reap the economic benefits of quantum technologies, boasting a world leading science profile, successful early-stage VC funding landscape and effective collaboration between Government, academia and industry.

Investing for growth

Quantum is central to the UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy, published earlier this year and was named as one of six priority frontier technologies in the Digital and Technologies Sector Plan, with £670m new quantum funding being released in Spring 2026, including a 10-year funding settlement for the National Quantum Computing Centre. It is this type of long-term commitment that has led Oxford Economics to project that quantum computing could give the UK an economy-wide productivity boost of up to 7% by 2045 – equivalent to an addition of up to £212 billion to the UK’s GDP. A variety of different technologies are expected to contribute to that. Many, but not all, of these rely on the development of more powerful and fault-tolerant quantum computers. Expected applications include:

The UK has made a good start in creating the conditions for its quantum businesses to thrive, we now need to devote equal attention to helping those businesses scale up. There is a need for ‘patient capital’ – quantum investments have a huge potential payoff, but not necessarily in short timescales.

Regulating for growth

New technology tends to attract new regulation. To avoid stifling the growth of this growing sector, the UK should:

Access to quantum computing infrastructure

Access to world class computing resources is one of the necessary conditions for quantum-focused organisations to develop their technology and scale up. Mills & Reeve is proud to be playing its part in creating these conditions – we recently advised the University of Cambridge on a series of agreements with the quantum computing company IonQ, which will lead to the creation of the IonQ Quantum Innovation Centre. The Centre will house a state-of-the-art IonQ 256-qubit quantum computer, which will be the most powerful quantum computer in the UK when it is installed. This project was led by IP & Commercial partner Alex Woolgar and a multi‑disciplinary team including Alastair Cotton, Seb Allen-Johnstone, James Field, Amanda McLaughlin and James Foster.

The future is now

While quantum has not yet had its ‘AI moment’, it may come sooner than we think. The UK can lead the world in bringing quantum technologies to market if it creates the conditions for these technologies to succeed.

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