Qubic Cryogenic Amplifiers Win CA$1.5 Million Canadian Contract

On September 11, 2026, Qubic signed a contract with an unnamed Canadian federal agency for up to CA$1.5 million (US$1.1 million) in Qubic cryogenic amplifiers. The Innovative Solutions Canada Testing Stream buy covers nine Kinetic Inductance Traveling Wave Parametric Amplifier units, plus components and software, for cryogenic tests as low-noise quantum-computing receivers. Delivery starts in fall 2026. Milestones are due by spring 2027. 

KI-TWPA Readout and Heat Load

KI-TWPAs from Qubic target wideband, ultra-low-noise microwave gain with projected heat below 0.1 mW per device. Conventional cryogenic amps, in company language, take nearly half a dilution refrigerator’s cooling budget. The units are built first for superconducting-qubit readout and are also described as usable with other modalities.

Qubic skips Josephson-junction inductors and draws nonlinear inductance from the transmission-line material, a design it presents as more robust near the quantum limit and suited to multiplexed readout. The firm is a spin-off of the Institut Quantique in Sherbrooke and the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo.

Federal Test Buy and Sales Path 

The unnamed buyer will run the hardware in a cryogenic lab and send performance notes back under the Testing Stream rules. Qubic, based in Sherbrooke with R&D in Waterloo, reports nearly CA$10 million in equity and grants to date.

On May 26, 2026, it named Quantum Machines as its first amplifier customer.

On June 23, 2026, it closed an oversubscribed US$2.5 million (CA$3.5 million) seed led by Two Small Fish Ventures, with UC Investments, Quantacet, and UCeed. CEO and co-founder Jerome Bourassa said quantum computing needs hardware such as the amplifier to reach utility-scale in the medium term.