Product Management Confabulation
What Product Managers are talking about.
C12 is announcing that it recently raised an €18 million funding round ($19.4 million at today’s exchange rate). Originally founded in 2020 as a spin-off from the Physics Laboratory of the École Normale Supérieure, the company has been working on a unique process to create quantum computers based on carbon nanotubes. While the concept of […]
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Microsoft and Quantinuum today announced a major breakthrough in quantum error correction. Using Quantinuum’s ion-trap hardware and Microsoft’s new qubit-virtualization system, the team was able to run more than 14,000 experiments without a single error. This new system also allowed the team to check the logical qubits and correct any errors it encountered without destroying […]
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We’re still years away from seeing physical quantum computers break into the market with any scale and reliability, but don’t give up on deep tech. The market for high-level quantum computer science — which applies quantum principles to manage complex computations in areas like finance and artificial intelligence — appears to be quickening its pace. […]
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Microsoft today announced its roadmap for building its own quantum supercomputer, using the topological qubits the company’s researchers have been working on for quite a few years now. There are still plenty of intermediary milestones to be reached, but Krysta Svore, Microsoft’s VP of advanced quantum development, told us that the company believes that it will take fewer than ten years to build a quantum supercomputer using these qubits that will be able to perform a reliable one million quantum operations per second. That’s a new measurement Microsoft is introducing as the overall industry aims to move beyond the current era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing.
“We think about our roadmap and the time the quantum supercomputer in terms of years rather than decades,” Svore said.
Last year, Microsoft announced a major breakthrough when its team first highlighted its ability to create Majorana-based qubits. Majorana qubits have the advantage of being very stable (especially compared to traditional techniques) but they are also extremely difficult to create. Microsoft made an early bet on this technology and now, a year after first announcing this milestone, the team is publishing a new peer-reviewed paper (in the American Physical Society’s Physical Review B) that establishes that it has indeed achieved this first milestone on its way to a quantum supercomputer. To get to this point, Microsoft showed results from more devices and far more data than a year ago when it first announced this work.
Image Credits: Microsoft
“Today, we’re really at this foundational implementation level,” Svore said. We have noisy intermediate-scale quantum machines. They’re built around physical qubits and they’re not yet reliable enough to do something practical and advantageous in terms of something useful. For science or for the commercial industry. The next level we need to get to as an industry is the resilient level. We need to be able to operate not just with physical qubits but we need to take those physical qubits and put them into an error-correcting code and use them as a unit to serve as a logical qubit.” Svore argues that to reach this point, it’ll take a quantum computer that can perform those one million reliable quantum operations per second and a failure rate of one per trillion operations.
The next step now is to build hardware-protected qubits — and Svore said that the team is making great strides in its work to build these. These qubits will be small (less than 10 microns on a side) and fast enough to perform one qubit operation in less than a microsecond. After that, the team plans to work on entangling these qubits and operate them through a process called braiding, a concept that has been discussed (mostly as a theory) since at least the early 2000s.
From there, it’s on to build a smaller multi-qubit system and demonstrate a full quantum system.
That’s obviously an ambitious roadmap and given how long it took Microsoft to achieve even the first milestone, we’ll have to wait and see how well the team can now execute. With IBM, IonQ and others aiming for similar results — but using more established methods for building their qubits — we’re in a bit of an arms race right now to move beyond the NISQ era.
In addition to sharing its roadmap, Microsoft today also announced Azure Quantum Elements, its platform for accelerating scientific discovery by combining high-performance computing, AI and quantum, as well as Copilot for Azure Quantum, a specially trained AI model that can help scientists (and students) generate quantum-related calculations and simulations.
Microsoft expects to build a quantum supercomputer within 10 years by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
Quantum computers have the potential to carry out highly complicated calculations in minutes that would have taken classical computers thousands of years to work out. But much of the industry is still in its infancy, partly because of a lack of domain experts and software tools that match the progress of quantum hardware.
Now companies are working to simplify the process of developing quantum software applications so programmers don’t actually need to understand the underlying quantum mechanics. One of the early-stage startups making such an effort is Singapore-based Horizon Quantum Computing, whose tools can automatically construct quantum algorithms based on programs written in classical languages.
The company recently picked up $18.1 million in a Series A round from Tencent along with other investors, boosting its equity financing to around $21.3 million. Other investors in the Series A round included Sequoia Capital India, SGInnovate, Pappas Capital and Expeditions Fund.
The money raised will be used for product development and its expansion in Europe, where the company is planning to open an office in Dublin, Ireland. The startup is also scheduled to launch the early access program of its developer tools later this year.
While Singapore is more widely known as a financial hub, it has also been one of the most proactive governments in supporting quantum technologies. The Center for Quantum Technologies, where Horizon Quantum Computing’s founder and CEO Joe Fitzsimons used to be a professor, was set up under the city-state’s Research Centres of Excellence program to advance research in the cutting-edge field.
“When I made the jump from academia, Singapore already had the right talent [for quantum computing] and there was access to capital,” said Fitzsimons, who earned a PhD from University of Oxford.
As a country that has historically been rather politically neutral, Singapore is also less prone to trade or technological sanctions, the founder reckoned.
This is important in a world where businesses are increasingly caught in the tech war between the U.S. and China/ Launching from a neutral home base is now seen as a prerequisite to many tech firms, including quantum computer builders that rely on components sourced from around the world.
Tencent’s investment in Horizon Quantum Computing is purely financial so it won’t entail any transfer of sensitive data, the founder noted. The startup took Tencent’s investment because the giant is an “expert” in the area, he said.
Indeed, the social networking and gaming giant has shown a keen interest in the field by opening its quantum research lab in 2018. Ling Ge, Tencent’s chief representative in Europe and the main person who oversaw the deal in Horizon Quantum Computing, has known Fitzsimons since her years in Oxford where she studied quantum computing.
“At Tencent, we take a long-term perspective on quantum. In our own quantum lab, we are focused on fundamental research, first principles simulations and quantum algorithms, and how these might serve enterprise customers,” said Ge at an industry event last year.
“In terms of investments, we take a science-driven approach. One of the challenges in investing in quantum is what we call the ‘black box’ paradox. The challenge of evaluating early-stage deep tech companies in areas like quantum, nuclear fusion or biotech is difficult because the core technology is in its early proof-of-concept phase. It is hard to evaluate and understand at what stage of maturity it really is.
“Therefore, we take appropriate steps to mitigate the risks of this black box paradox depending on the investment stage. This is primarily achieved through our deep technical expertise, which allows us to really understand what is being developed and its maturity,” she said.
Tencent backs Singapore’s Horizon Quantum Computing in $18M round by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
Nvidia and Quantum Machines, the Israeli startup offering an orchestration platform to controlling and operating quantum processors, today announced the launch of Nvidia DGX Quantum, which combines Nvidia’s Grace Hopper Superchip with Quantum Machines’ controller.
Over the course of the last few years, it’s become increasingly clear that to effectively operate a quantum computer, you’ll also need a lot of classical compute resources to control these systems. And these two systems also need to be tightly integrated, in part because you need to run calibration and error correction algorithms on the classical machines to keep the quantum machines running. But every additional compute cycle then also helps to run additional functions and evaluate the data from the quantum computer.
“Quantum computers do have a very natural place — and that is to power supercomputers,” said Quantum Machines co-founder and CEO Itamar Sivan. “The most natural place for them, I think, is in supercomputing infrastructure and cloud infrastructure. On the one hand, these will be the first places to integrate quantum computing at a greater scale. We want to power these supercomputers with quantum, but we also want to power the quantum with the supercomputers.”
Image Credits: Quantum Machines
That’s what this collaboration is all about. You can’t run a quantum computer without massive classical compute resources and for a supercomputer, quantum essentially becomes another co-processor for handling specific tasks, similar to how GPUs are often used to accelerate machine learning tasks, for example.
“If you have a million cubits or hundreds of thousands of cubits and each has a dozen parameters that need to be independently optimized — the leaders in the community are turning their attention towards AI methods, which shine on an NVIDIA platform,” explained Tim Costa, Nvidia’s director of high performance computing and quantum. “There’s this huge GPU compute requirement for standing up a computer which will deliver on the promise of quantum. And to do that, of course, we have to get tightly coupled to quantum, so we need to work with the leader in the field in terms of interfacing with quantum and controlling quantum, which is Quantum Machine.”
Nvidia teams up with Quantum Machines to combine classical and quantum machines by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
The U.K.’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt’s spring budget — delivered on the same day that teachers, transportation workers, civil servants and others were on strike across the country — sought to strike a note of its own: optimism in the face of many signals to the contrary. With the U.K. narrowly predicted to avoid a recession this year and next, Hunt also used the moment to announce a string of funding injections into the country’s technology sector, including a new quantum computing hub; an annual £1 million prize called the “Manchester Prize” for AI research; and £3 billion in investments in “high growth” business in the next 10 years.
The announcements are coming in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank crisis — the company’s U.K. subsidiary was snapped up by incumbent HSBC earlier this week as one part of that — and it underscores the potential role government plays to complement and bolster what’s playing out in the private sector. Whether the U.K. sticks to the plans laid out today, how those might shift with a change in government, and whether the sums it’s committing make a dent in the global tech economy, remain to be seen.
The government’s been running its own investment operation, called British Patient Capital, since 2018, with a commitment to pump £2.5 billion into high-growth U.K. businesses to boost their fundraising activities and to help close the gap between the U.K. and leading countries like the U.S. when it comes to funding. That has seen the firm, which is part of the British Business Bank, back companies like CyberSmart and Quantum Motion, as well as indirectly in separate funds investing along the same thesis. Today Hunt said that British Patient Capital would get a further £3 billion in funding to invest for the next 10 years, with a focus on R&D-intensive industries.
Alongside this, Hunt said that the Local Government Pension Scheme, which has assets of £364 billion, will be orienting more funds into investing in innovative companies “and other productive assets”. Pension schemes in countries like Canada have been some of the biggest indirect and direct investors in startups (and not just startups in Canada) so this is an interesting development. Hunt also announced “a new Long-term Investment for Technology and Science (LIFTS) initiative,” which is described as a “competition” to encourage other pension fund-related investing initiatives. This seemed a little fluffy, so we’ll have to see what comes of this, and whether others bite at the idea.
Another big tech focus in the budget today was quantum technology — an area full of promise because of the jump that it will offer in terms of computing power; but also elusive, since a lot of its best ideas are still largely theoretical. That makes putting a lot of investment into startups and academic research focused on quantum computing a risky but potentially very lucrative bet, and one perhaps best suited for a public body to be making, given how early but foundational some of the work has been and will be.
To that end, the U.K. is setting some ambitious targets here, with plans to invest up to £2.5 billion over the next 10 years on quantum. That funding will cover not just engineering and research investments, but also funding for businesses that are investing in quantum technologies and pilot projects, as well as investment into the first steps of what quantum technology regulation might look like.
It also plans to put £900 million into the building of what it described as a “exascale supercomputer” to work on research and run projects. It’s notable that this wasn’t described as a quantum computer, and it may well not be. Likely there will be debates and bids for different approaches when and if this project takes shape.
A lot of the heart and soul of how technology has evolved over the last decade has been in the world of startups and technology companies rather than in research labs attached to universities. With the big downturn in venture funding, and the pressure we’re seeing on both private and publicly-traded tech companies, it will be interesting to see if the next ten years’ most interesting innovations are still among those companies, or if they do shift back to the slightly safer terrain of academia.
The government is hedging its bets to some extent with tranches of funding that could see money landing on both sides of that innovation landscape.
Prominent here will be a new £1 million award that it will be giving out called the “Manchester Prize”, Hunt said, which will be given out annually for the next 10 years to researchers that “drive progress in critical areas of AI. While £1 million feels like small change in the world of startups, it’s a massive sum for most (not all!) academics and researchers. It’s notable that the idea of the prize is focused on AI rather than other technologies. That really points to what a hold AI has on public discourse in technology and beyond right now.
The U.K. is doing this in part, it says, because it believes it needs to invest in its own “sovereign capability” around its own AI foundation models, which points to what kinds of AI research might be most likely to win the annual prizes. AI feels like a fast-moving target right now, and it’s really not clear what kinds of economic or social implications it will have in the short, medium or longer terms. The government also plans to establish a task force to help advise it on future strategy in this area, too.
Another big area of investment will be accelerators: there are plans to invest £100 million to grow three “innovation clusters” in Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow, and to specifically tap 26 R&D projects respectively to boost AI, health and medicine and quantum across the three cities.
All in all, a lot of promises, and it will take getting budgets approved and consistent agreement across multiple leaders and stakeholders (and most likely political parties and governments) to push many of these commitments through. And yes, there remains the question of whether state support will give the tech industry the fuel and more importantly the confidence it needs to grow.
Even just out of the gate, the opposition Labour party criticized Hunt’s focus and solutions.
Labour leader Kier Starmer summed up the U.K. as “Stuck in the waiting room with only a sticking plaster,” a reference to the underfunding of the country’s health service, and re-upped the point by describing the country as “The sick man of Europe once again.”
UK Spring Budget: Chancellor plans £1M annual AI prize, quantum investments, and a new £900M ‘exascale’ computer by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
QuantWare, the Dutch startup that builds quantum processors for research and commercial usage, today announced that it has raised a €6 million seed round (that’s about $6.33 million) led by Dutch deep tech investor Forward.One, with participation from QDNL Participations and Graduate Entrepreneur, among others. The company says it will use this new funding to scale up its team and support the production and development of its 64-qubit Tenor processor, which, thanks to its innovative architecture, will now allow the company to more quickly scale to larger qubit chips.
Last year, QuantWare was selected to deliver the quantum processing units for Israel’s first quantum computer (together with the likes of Quantum Machines) and in recent months the company launched its foundry service for helping others fabricate their own superconducting quantum chips and its first nonprocessor product, the “Crescendo” amplifier. All of this is happening against a backdrop of increased interest in an open hardware ecosystem — comparable to where classical computing is today.
Right now, though, the focus for QuantWare is its new processor. As the company’s CEO and co-founder Matthijs Rijlaarsdam told me, the major advancement is in how it connects the different qubits. With this new processor, the company is going 3D and bringing in these control lines from the top. “This will allow us to create modules that we can stick together and then get to very large qubit counts very rapidly,” he explained. The company expects to be able to at least double its qubit count on an annual basis — and Rijlaarsdam noted that even if they could go faster, given the current state of the overall industry, it would be very hard for any potential customer to control a 1,000-qubit machine right now.
When QuantWare first launched, Rijlaarsdam told me that the company wanted to enable others to build quantum computers. “We’re trying to enable people to become Dell — the Dell of quantum,” he said at the time. That would make QuantWare akin to Intel and AMD for quantum computing. And with a project like Israel’s first quantum computer as a marquee customer, it looks like some of these bets are now paying off. “There’s an ecosystem forming around our processors. So that’s really exciting to see,” said Rijlaarsdam.
He also noted that the company, which was spun out of TU Delf/QuTech, expects that it will be able to scale to any current demand — it’s not like there are thousands of firms looking to build a quantum computer, after all. QuantWare, which currently uses national cleanrooms available to researchers and companies in the Netherlands, will continue to bring more of its production in-house over time. “It’s not really about volume,” Rijlaarsdam said. “It’s about quality. It’s about fully controlling your process.”
The company tells me that it raised more than it had originally planned. Rijlaarsdam tells me that the plan is, thanks to this investment, the company will roughly double in size, but a lot of the investment will also go into acquiring fabrication and measurement equipment (measurement equipment, Rijlaarsdam noted, is a bit of a bottleneck for the industry as a whole).
QuantWare raises €6M to scale its quantum processor business by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch
U.K. quantum computing company Quantum Motion has raised £42 million ($50.5 million) in an equity round of funding led by Bosch Ventures (RBVC), with participation from Porsche, the U.K. government’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), and a host of additional investors.
Quantum computing, for the uninitiated, builds on principles borrowed from quantum mechanics, with a focus on quantum bits (qubits) rather than atoms, promising to advance what’s possible with computers by performing complex calculations in a fraction of the time. Use-cases may include accelerating new drug discoveries, or powering the vast amount of data processing required for AI applications.
“Quantum computers will think in totally different ways to computers today,” Quantum Motion CEO James Palles-Dimmock explained to TechCrunch. “Problems that would take a supercomputer thousands of years to crack could be solved by a quantum computer in minutes. The earliest impact will be in areas related to materials science including energy materials, chemistry such as drug discovery, or optimization — possibly stretching to logistics and transport.”
Founded in 2017 by Professors John Morton and Simon Benjamin from UCL and Oxford University respectively, Quantum Motion is setting out to create “scalable quantum computers” through new quantum computing architectures that are compatible with established silicon processing.
As with normal computers, heat adversely impacts the qubits in quantum computing, meaning that quantum computers need to be kept very cold. Quantum Motion says it has designed integrated circuits that are capable of “generating, routing and processing signals at deep cryogenic temperatures,” operating at just a few tenths of a degree above absolute zero.
“Our silicon-based quantum chips are typically a few millimetres across, and we expect that the cooling system required to operate the chip will have a form factor similar to a standard 19-inch server rack,” Palles-Dimmock said. “Being able to show that our approach to quantum computing doesn’t require data centres the size of football pitches, or vast CERN-type facilities, was one of the motivations behind our central London location.”
Quantum Motion: working on dilution fridge Image Credits: Quantum Motion
Quantum Motion’s latest raise comes amidst a flurry of activity in the quantum computing space. In the past month alone we’ve seen French startup Pasqal raise €100 million, while Israel’s Quantum Machines closed out its Series B round at $70 billion and Australia’s Quantum Brilliance secured $18 million. Elsewhere over the past year, Finland’s IQM, France’s Alice&Bob, and U.K.-based Quantum Circuits have all raised sizeable chunks of VC cash.
Quantum Motion and its ilk are up against a host of competition in the big tech sphere too, including IBM which recently unveiled its 433 qubit Osprey quantum computer, while Google gained a new quantum computing sibling last year after Alphabet spun out Sandbox AQ as a standalone company, going on to raise $500 million in funding just last week. Elsewhere, other tech juggernauts such as Microsoft and Intel are also investing heavily in quantum.
So, what can Quantum Motion and its upstart brethren bring to the mix that the deep-pocketed behemoths can’t?
“Compared to the big tech companies, our advantage is that we are agile, focused on a single goal and have a team that is comparable with the best in the world,” Palles-Dimmock said. “We have a highly skilled team across multiple disciplines including IC (instrumentation and control) engineering, quantum theory, hardware and software, and deep relationships with world leading universities that helps us seek out that talent.”
Quantum Motion CEO James Palles-Dimmock with co-founders Prof. John Morton (CTO), and Prof. Simon Benjamin (CSO) Image Credits: Quantum Motion
Quantum Motion had previously raised around $24 million in equity and grand funding, and with its fresh cash injection, the company said that it plans to accelerate its development of silicon quantum processors through forging “deeper ties” with manufacturers. Indeed, the startup’s strategic investors including Bosch and Porsche provide some clue as to the impact that Quantum Motion is looking to have on industry — quantum computing could transform battery technology as we know it, allowing scientists and researchers to simulate batteries to better understand what is going on at a molecular level to optimize materials and thus improve energy density.
But the true possibilities are effectively endless, and it’s difficult to conceive just how transformative quantum computing will prove.
“Just like computing in the early 1960s, it was hard to predict just what amazing things computing would lead to, and yet it has revolutionised our society,” Palles-Dimmock said. “It was only when computers got into the hands of people everywhere that we got really creative and pushed the boundaries of what computers can do. Quantum computing will be similar, we know that it will be transformative in areas like drug discovery, battery technology and more, but we won’t know just how transformative they’ll become until we get there.”
It’s worth noting that while quantum computing is advancing at breakneck speed, it’s still in its relative infancy, and the fruits of all the current R&D labor we’re seeing across the board may still be some years off.
“Many quantum computing companies exist today and they are all in R&D mode,” Palles-Dimmock said. “Investors know it will take time. It may be the end of the decade before we have really impactful quantum computers. This raise enables us to strengthen our relationship with manufacturing partners and demonstrate prototypes that can scale to millions of qubits.”
Quantum Motion’s latest cash injection included contributions from Octopus Ventures, Oxford Sciences Enterprises, British Patient Capital, Inkef, Parkwalk Advisors, and IP Group.
U.K. quantum computing startup Quantum Motion raises $50.5M by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch