How Virgo PR Took a Quantum Startup to a $140M Raise

An 18-month communications campaign built the credibility infrastructure that made one of 2026's largest deep-tech raises possible — before the company had a product to sell.

The Challenge

Quantum Art is an Israeli trapped-ion quantum computing company. When Virgo PR took the engagement, the company had no public presence — no media footprint, no executive visibility, no website narrative. It was operating entirely in stealth.

That's a problem when you need to raise $100 million.

The quantum computing sector is dominated by IBM, IonQ, and Quantinuum — companies that have spent years and hundreds of millions building brand equity. Reporters default to them for comment. Investors know their names. Quantum Art needed to compete for capital against that field on the strength of its science and its potential — months before a commercial product existed.

The mandate to Virgo: build the credibility that would make a nine-figure raise possible.

The Strategy

Virgo built the full communications program from zero. The work started with fundamentals — a messaging architecture and executive media training, informed by a deep review of Quantum Art's scientific papers, technical milestones, and internal strategy discussions. The goal was to translate dense quantum physics into investor-grade narrative the executive team could deliver under pressure.

From there, Virgo made a decision that defined the campaign: no single launch moment.

Most companies in stealth treat their first public appearance as an event — one press release, one news cycle, then silence until the funding announcement. That approach burns a single cycle and leaves a credibility vacuum for the next twelve months. Competitors fill it.

Instead, Virgo mapped an 18-month milestone calendar — a sustained cadence of announcements designed to compound. Architecture reveals. Roadmap milestones. Peer-reviewed research results. Commercial partnerships, including an Nvidia CUDA-Q integration. Each announcement built on the last, creating a trail of proof points that demonstrated real technical progress to the investors and industry audiences who would ultimately fund the company's growth.

The media campaign paired that cadence with strategic introductions to tier-one business, technology, and trade press — Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, SiliconAngle — alongside the quantum trade publications and the industry's most relevant podcasts. Every placement was engineered to reach investors and enterprise buyers, not vanity audiences.

Virgo also ran a narrative control play. In a sector where reporters default to IBM and Google for comment on quantum computing, Virgo positioned Quantum Art's executives — including CEO Tal David — as go-to sources on trapped-ion architecture, multicore quantum computing, and real-world optimization use cases. That editorial authority compounds. It doesn't expire after one cycle.

The Results

The campaign carried Quantum Art from stealth to one of the most visible trapped-ion quantum computing companies in the market.

• $140M+ Series A — an initial $100M close, extended with an oversubscribed $40M add-on four months later
• ~$164M in lifetime funding secured during the engagement
• 100+ media placements across tier-one business outlets, quantum trade press, international media, and industry podcasts
• Globes' Most Promising Startups of 2026 — the company was named to the list during the engagement window

Investors included Bedford Ridge Capital, Hudson Bay Capital, Poalim Equity, and others.

Selected Coverage

Tier-One Business & Funding

• Forbes — 1,000 Qubits Here We Come: Quantum Art's Series A Is Now $140 Million
• Forbes — Why Diamonds Might Just Be Quantum Computing's Best Friend
• The Wall Street Journal — Bedford Ridge Capital Leads $100 Million Investment in Quantum Art
• Business Insider — In Israeli Tech, Investors Are Writing Fewer Checks but Making Them Much Bigger
• SiliconAngle — Quantum Art Raises $140M to Scale Quantum Computing with a Unique 'Multicore' Architecture

Trade & Technical Press

• Engineering.com — Quantum Art Advances Scalable Quantum Computing with CUDA-Q
• GamesBeat — Quantum Art Integrates Nvidia for Its Scalable Quantum Computers
• Quantum Zeitgeist — Fully Programmable Quantum Computing with Trapped Ions
• Quantum Computing Report — Quantum Art Extends Series A to $140M to Scale Trapped-Ion Architecture

Podcasts & Broadcast

• TechFirst w/ John Koetsier — 1 Million Qubits in 50 Square Millimeters
• Post Quantum World Podcast w/ Konstantinos — Quantum vs. Traffic: A Real-World Optimization Use Case with Tal David of Quantum Art

The Takeaway

The conventional playbook for stealth-stage companies treats communications as a launch-day deliverable — one announcement, then back to building. Virgo's Quantum Art campaign is a case study in the opposite approach: build the narrative infrastructure before the capital raise, not during it.

By the time Quantum Art went to market for its Series A, investors had already seen the company in Forbes, the Journal, and across the quantum trade press — repeatedly, over months. The story wasn't new. The credibility was already built. The round closed at $100M. Then it extended to $140M+ because demand exceeded supply.

For communications practitioners, the lesson is structural: sustained campaign architecture outperforms launch-day events, especially in deep-tech sectors where investors need compounding proof points before they write nine-figure checks. One news cycle doesn't build that. Eighteen months of sequenced milestones does.

Related Coverage on Everything-PR

• What Quantum PR Taught Me About Deep-Tech Comms — Kyle Porter's own lessons from running this campaign.
• Leveraging Storytelling When Raising Capital