Beijing quantum software company Arclight Quantum (弧光量子) has closed a strategic A+ round of more than RMB 100 million (~$14 million) led by the China Mobile Chain Leader Fund, cementing its position as the most vertically integrated pure-play quantum software business in mainland China.
The only pan-modality quantum software house in China
Founded in November 2020 as a spin-out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Software, Arclight is led by founder and CEO Ying Shenggang (应圣钢), a Tsinghua Ph.D. who trained as a postdoc at the University of Technology Sydney. The company describes itself as "the only enterprise domestically covering multiple chip routes and spanning the full chain from hardware tools through application deployment," a pitch aimed squarely at the segmented quantum hardware landscape that has emerged inside China around superconducting, ion-trap and neutral-atom devices.
A stack from isQ down to EDA
Arclight's product line is unusually broad for a Chinese quantum company. It includes the isQ quantum programming language, the isQ-Core compiler, quantum EDA tools for chip defect detection and control, the SOFT and SymFT simulators, the Arclight Quantum Cloud, and the Quantumquill (量羽) machine-learning platform. Named customers already include China Mobile Cloud, China Unicom Quantum and Sinopec, which anchor the company's telecom, cloud and energy verticals. The new China Mobile cheque adds a strategic lock on those workloads.
Why China Mobile
China Mobile Chain Leader Fund has emerged in 2026 as one of the most active state-adjacent investors in quantum, having backed multiple domestic hardware and software plays this year. Beijing's line is that quantum has to move from science to industrial software, and Arclight's isQ toolchain gives the operator a house-side platform for wiring quantum backends into its cloud services and future 6G-adjacent workloads. The company said proceeds will fund product engineering, industrial pilots and international collaborations.
What comes next
Arclight is expected to publish new quantum-EDA benchmarks in late 2026, including papers submitted to DAC on faster CNOT synthesis and lower neutral-atom QEC error rates. For the wider quantum software market, the round is a signal that Chinese buyers now expect one-stop toolchains rather than research-grade libraries.
Reporting based on coverage from Tencent News, 36Kr and The Quantum Insider.