Tag: quantum computing

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Quantum sensing startup Q-CTRL raises another $27.4M

Two quantum-adjacent technologies — quantum sensing (QS) and quantum communication (Qcomm) — are as important as quantum computing hardware itself since they help make quantum computers function more accurately. 

A Sydney-based startup called Q-CTRL has built quantum-sensing software that helps reduce errors on quantum computers. Today, the company announced that it has raised another $27.4 million in funding.

The Series B extension comes nearly 14 months after the startup raised its $25 million Series B in November 2021. CEO of Q-CTRL, Michael Biercuk, told TechCrunch the startup made major discoveries and demonstrations of its technology almost immediately after its last raise.

Sydney-based quantum sensing startup Q-CTRL raises $25M Series B led by Airbus Ventures

“We had spent almost four years building core capabilities and then finally put them all together to show how we could improve the performance of an entire quantum algorithm beyond just the individual components of the hardware,” Biercuk told TechCrunch. “By March 2022, we had achieved up to approximately 9,000 times improvement in the likelihood that a quantum algorithm executed using our tools would give the correct answer.” 

Biercuk explained this discovery was one of many benchmarks that help prove the startup could transform the performance of quantum computers, delivering enhanced utility to end users. 

The significant breakthroughs also led to growth in sales. Q-CTRL’s sales bookings grew three times to over $15 million in CY 2022, Biercuk said. The startup has more than 8,000 users, including government contracts with the U.S., defense agencies in Australia and quantum computing companies like Rigetti, IonQ, IBM, Atom Computing, Alice & Bob, Nord Quantique and Pasqal, among others. Universities and national labs also use Q-CTRL’s tools; many corporations (EY, KPMG, Capgemini, Quanscient, Xerox PARC and Classiq) have sealed commercial partnership deals with Q-CTRL. 

The outfit has four products: Black Opal, Boulder Opal, Fire Opal and Open Controls. Last October, Q-CTRL, which focused on making quantum computers useful (sooner), launched a learning platform, Black Opal Enterprise, designed to help corporations and organizations understand quantum computing to build quantum-ready teams. That was followed by the release of Black Opal in April 2022 to help individuals learn quantum computing. 

Salesforce Ventures, Alumni Ventures, ICM Allectus, Mindrock Capital, Bill Lightfoot (a former partner at General Dynamics) and John Eales (an Australian business leader and global rugby legend) participated in the latest round. Previous investors include Airbus Ventures, Data Collective, Horizons, Main Sequence Ventures and Ridgeline Partners. 

The company did not provide valuation information, but says it will use the proceeds to continue developing its quantum technology, concentrating on product engineering, sales and marketing capacity. It also plans to grow its team from 80 to approximately 120 this year across Sydney, Los Angeles and Berlin offices. 

Applications of quantum sensors range from bioimaging, spectroscopy, navigation that provides high-accuracy GPS, environmental monitoring (volcanic disruption prediction, CO2 emission measurement) and more, per a McKinsey report. 

“Hiring teams of specialists can be risky and expensive. Q-CTRL’s frictionless quantum infrastructure software has a shallow learning curve and allows CIOs and CTOs to become quantum ready today, reducing enterprise risk,” said Heather West, IDC research manager, in a statement. “Q-CTRL anticipates that with its software, enterprises will be able to leverage the skills of their current IT developers to easily develop, optimize and execute quantum algorithms and obtain high levels of performance on any given hardware at a low net cost.” 

“Q-CTRL’s technology stands head-and-shoulders above the rest of the industry in tackling the most foundational challenge in quantum computing,” said Robert Keith, managing director of Salesforce Ventures. “Q-CTRL’s products are essential for enterprise adoption of quantum computing, and their use of AI is delivering critical insights across hardware platforms that no one else can match.” 

Quantum Machines continues to grow in spite of economic uncertainity

Quantum sensing startup Q-CTRL raises another $27.4M by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch

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Pasqal raises $100M to build a neutral atom-based quantum computer

Pasqal, a Paris-based quantum computing startup, today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round let by Singapore’s Temasek. In addition to Temasek, existing investors Quantonation, the Defense Innovation Fund, Daphni and Eni Next, as well as new investors European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, Wa’ed Ventures and Bpifrance (through its Large Venture Fund) also participated in this round.

What makes Pasqal, which was founded in early 2019, stand out in an increasingly crowded field of quantum computing startups is that the company is betting on neutral atoms quantum computing. This is a relatively new and potentially game-changing approach to building quantum processors. Instead of trapped ions (like IonQ) or superconducting quantum computers (like IBM), neutral atom quantum processors use lasers to hold atoms in place with what is essentially an optical tweezer.

As you can imagine, building the technology to hold a single atom — and only a single atom — in this trap created its own challenges, but that’s mostly a solved problem now. The advantage here is that once you can do this with hundreds of atoms at the same time, you can create both a very dense matrix of qubits and one that, using holographic methods, you can reshuffle in 3D space as needed for a given algorithm. And all of this happens at room temperature. That almost makes these machines more akin to Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) than more traditional quantum processors. You can find a Pasqal’s paper about this process with more details here and it’s also worth noting that Alain Aspect, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum entanglement in 2022, is one of Pasqal’s co-founders.

Image Credits: Pasqal

As Pasqal co-founder and CEO Georges-Olivier Reymond told me, the company has already demonstrated that it can control more than 300 atoms at a time. “It’s very hard to have only one atom in a laser beam and to monitor it and to control it,” he explained. “But once you achieve that, you can almost easily scale that and you can create arrays in any shape you want.” He noted that the qubits are similar to ion-based qubits in terms of their coherence time and fidelity, yet this flexibility and ability to pack these atoms in a very dense array, with only a couple of microns between the qubits, could give this technology an advantage.

Reymond noted that with some of these basic capabilities now in place, the team is working on building the quantum control system so it can start implementing quantum algorithms. And while there are startups that focus on building quantum control hardware, none of them are optimized for neutral atoms, he noted, so the company decided to build its own system.

Clearly, the Pasqal team is quite optimistic about its system and Reymond believes that the team will be able to show its potential customers “quantum business advantage” in 2024. He believes that this will take a system with 200 to 300 qubits.

At this point, most researchers believe that we won’t see the industry trend toward a single technology for solving every algorithm. Instead, different quantum technologies will find their sweet spots for solving different problems. For Pasqal, the team believes that its system will work especially well for graph-centric problems. “There are a lot of computational challenges that you can reframe in the shape of a graph,” he explained. “What we can do with atoms, is we can represent the shape of this graph and embed the complexity of the algorithm in this geometry. In the end, instead of using thousands of quantum gates, just by implementing a couple of them, you can run your algorithm and then you are resilient to errors.”

The company is currently working with the likes of Crédit Agricole CIB, BASF, BMW, Siemens, Airbus, Johnson & Johnson and Thales to help them understand where its technology can solve their business needs.

“We are very proud of this new milestone in PASQAL’s development that will make the company a world leader,” said Christophe Jurczak, managing partner at Quantonation. “Quantonation has supported the company since its spin-off from Institut d’Optique. It is the first scale-up within Quantonation’s portfolio, and it truly illustrates the excellence of French research and the competitiveness of the French quantum ecosystem.”

Pasqal raises $100M to build a neutral atom-based quantum computer by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

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Quantum Machines continues to grow in spite of economic uncertainity

Conventional wisdom suggests that a Series B company should be hunkering down right now, cutting costs, weathering the storm, but Israeli startup Quantum Machines is defying this approach as it continues to grow in spite of the economic uncertainty swirling around the world.

The company announced that it got an additional $20 million tacked onto its $50 million Series B originally announced in September 2021. While co-founder and CEO Itamar Sivan wasn’t ready to talk specifics when it came to growth metrics, he suggested that unlike a lot of other startups in 2022, his company was meeting its growth and revenue goals.

“It’s funny, I met with one of our investors a couple of days ago, and they said, ours might actually be the only company they met recently that was on target for 2022,” Sivans told TechCrunch. The company actually doubled its revenue last year and is expected to do so again in 2023. While he wouldn’t share an exact number, he indicated that it reached at least $10 million last year. “I cannot speak to sales or anything like that, but I can say that it has two digits in millions of dollars. So it still leaves a broad range between 10 and 99,” he said

While customers may be cutting back on some tech, Sivans sees quantum research at a critical juncture, and he believes that’s why his company is adding customers. That means external economic conditions are having little impact on his startup, especially as countries around the world jockey for position around building quantum computers.

“I believe that quantum computing in this regard is a safer field to be in in this environment because countries cannot afford to lose this race. So if a country slows down for a couple of years [because of economic concerns]…this might be an irreversible process,” he said.

Because of the sensitive nature of quantum computing research, Sivans can’t name any of his customers directly, but did say that the company now has 280 customers across government, universities and corporations in 20 countries around the world. The company lists testimonial blurbs from a variety of institutions on its website including Harvard University, Weizmann Institute of Science, Seoul National University, ENS Lyon, USC and CEA Saclay, and it’s probably safe to guess that these testimonials are from customers.

It also made its first acquisition last year when it acquired QDevil, a Danish company that has built tooling to help control parts of the quantum process. The new company should dovetail well with the existing Quantum Machines platform. The company has split into two divisions as a result of this: Quantum Control and Quantum Electronics.

As we wrote at the time of the $50 million funding, the original platform looks at the role of classical computing in the quantum process:

As Sivan explains, the classical computer has a software and hardware layer, but quantum machines have three layers: “The quantum hardware, which is the heart, and on top of that you have classical hardware […] and then on top of that you have software,” he said.

“We focus on the two latter layers. So classical hardware and the software that drives it. Now at the heart of our hardware is in fact a classical processor. So this is I think one of the most interesting parts of the quantum stack,” he explained.

The startup, which had 60 employees when we spoke in September 2021, has grown to over 140 now and is continuing to hire.

The $20 million investment infusion, which closed late last year, came from a variety of unnamed institutional investors, along with existing investors Qualcomm Ventures, Red Dot Capital Partners, Samsung NEXT, Meron Capital and Alumni Ventures. The company has now raised $100 million.

Quantum Machines continues to grow in spite of economic uncertainity by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

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IBM unveils its 433 qubit Osprey quantum computer

IBM wants to scale up its quantum computers to over 4,000 qubits by 2025 — but we’re not quite there yet. For now, we have to make do with significantly smaller systems and today, IBM announced the launch of its Osprey quantum processor, which features 433 qubits, up from the 127 qubits of its 2021 Eagle processor. And with that, the slow but steady march toward a quantum processor with real-world applications continues.

“The new 433 qubit ‘Osprey’ processor brings us a step closer to the point where quantum computers will be used to tackle previously unsolvable problems,” said Darío Gil, Senior Vice President, IBM and Director of Research. “We are continuously scaling up and advancing our quantum technology across hardware, software and classical integration to meet the biggest challenges of our time, in conjunction with our partners and clients worldwide. This work will prove foundational for the coming era of quantum-centric supercomputing.”

Image Credits: IBM

IBM’s quantum roadmap includes two additional stages — the 1,121-qubit Condor and 1,386-qubit Flamingo processors in 2023 and 2024 — before it plans to hit the 4,000-qubit stage with its Kookaburra processor in 2025. So far, the company has generally been able to make this roadmap work, but the number of qubits in a quantum processor is obviously only one part of a very large and complex puzzle, with longer coherence times and reduced noise being just as important.

Ideally, that’s something developers who want to work with these machines wouldn’t have to worry about, so increasingly, the tools they use are abstracting the hardware away for them. With the new version of its Qiskit Runtime, for example, developers can now trade speed for reduced error count.

The company also today detailed its Quantum System Two — basically IBM’s quantum mainframe — which will be able to house multiple quantum processors and integrate them into a single system with high-speed communication links. The idea here is to launch this system by the end of 2023.

Image Credits: IBM

IBM unveils its 433 qubit Osprey quantum computer by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

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Liquid Instruments hooks up with $28.5M to upend the engineering testing market with software-defined instrumentation

Engineering innovations are a critical cornerstone in the evolution of technology, but ironically there haven’t been as many innovations in engineers’ tooling itself. Now, a startup called Liquid Instruments that’s devised a set of software and hardware to help engineers carry out one aspect of their work — testing — more efficiently is announcing a capital injection of $28.5 million to fuel its growth. It’s been on a roll with sales up 4x this year, with customers of its devices including NASA (where the founders first worked on the concept), Google and Qualcomm, Stanford and Duke, and the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Moore’s Law is alive and well here: the startup’s unique selling point is that it has built a new take on testing equipment by translating much of the process into software that sits on hardware that’s faster, many times smaller, and less costly than traditional testing equipment, and provides other kinds of flexibility, such as more dynamic visualizations, diagnostics, programability and the ability to work on the tests in the cloud.

This Series B round of equity funding, which I understand values the company at north of $100 million, will help Liquid Instruments continue to build out more hardware models, and to write more software-based more testing tools for those devices.

The company — founded originally in Australia and now officially headquartered in San Francisco — today sells three versions of its Moku hardware — the Go, the Lab and the Pro, respectively starting at $599, $3,500 and $12,000. They are part of a bigger area of software-defined test instrumentation, and Daniel Shaddock, the CEO and co-founder, first worked on a version of this tech when he was on a team building testing equipment in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for high precision wave detection using a similar software-defined approach.

After that project was done, Shaddock said he and some 11 others would have been “scattered to the wind”, working at other space agencies or academia, so he suggested that maybe they continue working together, to see how a similar concept could be applied to building testing equipment for the engineering world and academics at large. “It was great measurement technology,” he said, “so we thought, maybe others might like it, too.”

The devices use standard input ports and are based on flexible FPGA chip architecture. Today those chips are Xilinx chips from AMD, but the company is open to using “whatever the chip du jour might be” said Shaddock. That’s because its IP is not about the chips but about how they’re used to work “at the crossroads of analogue circuitry and digital processing,” he said. “What has been done previously on analogue devices, and distributed across many chips, are now all on FPGA chips. Now that they are larger, we can slice up the chip into more functions, and have them all work together.”

Although this is bringing down the price of testing devices, it’s not exactly putting Liquid Instruments into the category electronics companies building tools for hobbyists. Its customers rather span research and education through to government labs and industrial businesses, with applications including aerospace, defense, semiconductor, LiDAR and quantum computing. And it’s finding a lot of traction in all of them, with sales up four-fold in the last year.

The investors in this round also are a testament to its traction. Led by Acorn Capital, it also includes strategics like Lockheed Martin Ventures and Powerhouse Ventures, as well as previous backers Spirit Super/ANU Connect Ventures, MA Growth Ventures, Significant Capital Ventures, and Boman Enterprises. Liquid Instruments has to date raised $50 million.

“Liquid Instruments is creating a versatile test and measurement platform that is customizable and efficient,” said Chris Moran, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures, in a statement. “This technology has the potential to deliver mission critical functionality that can provide value to our customer. We are excited by Liquid’s continued growth and look forward to strengthening our collaboration.”

“Liquid Instruments’ Australian-developed software-defined approach is the manifestation of an ambitious plan targeting a vital market that has suffered from a deficit of innovation and imagination.” added Robert Routley, CEO, Acorn Capital. “We see tremendous potential for their platform to continue to grow and evolve, benefitting more industries over time. Liquid Instruments is well positioned to execute on its expansion strategy and disrupt the test and measurement sector and lead the industry through the much-needed transition from hardware to software.”

“This injection of capital will supercharge our ability to revolutionize the test and measurement industry,” said Daniel Shaddock, CEO, and co-founder of Liquid Instruments. “Our innovative software-first approach provides clear advantages over traditional hardware-based solutions, and this funding strongly positions us to lead this critical industry transformation.”

Liquid Instruments’ Moku product line offers the world’s most powerful and flexible software-defined instrumentation platform, harnessing the processing power and reconfigurability of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to combine multiple instruments into one compact and accessible device. These product offerings include the Moku:Go, a complete lab solution for engineers and students to actively test designs and projects, and the Moku:Pro, an integrated platform for the most demanding research and engineering applications.

“We are focused on enhancing cloud integration features for our products and scaling production of Moku:Go to help millions of undergraduate engineering students around the world unlock their full potential,” added Shaddock. “Moku’s will continue to receive new features via frequent over-the-air updates enabling new solutions in key commercial industries.”

Liquid Instruments hooks up with $28.5M to upend the engineering testing market with software-defined instrumentation by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

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EeroQ bets on helium for its quantum chip design

It’s still early days for quantum computing, but we’re currently seeing rapid improvements in the underlying hardware and software foundations for this new computing paradigm. And just like during the early days of classical computing, different hardware players are betting on very different approaches to how to build these machines. There’s IonQ with its trapped ion approach, D-Wave using quantum annealing and IBM, Rigetti and others with their bet on building a superconducting gate model machine. All of these approaches have their pros and cons and may eventually find their niches for solving different kinds of problems.

EeroQ, which announced a $7.25 million seed funding round today, is taking a somewhat different approach to these other players by betting on mass-produced CMOS chips that use electrons floating on liquid helium to power the core of its quantum processors. The advantage of this, the EeroQ team argues, is that it allows for very long coherence times (close to 10 seconds), fast gates and the ability to quickly scale the technology to thousands of qubits (though it isn’t quite there yet). The company was founded in 2017 and the team spent the last few years working on the fundamental science behind these designs. The company recently added Princeton Electrical & Computer Engineering Professor Steve Lyon as CTO and completed its headquarter and lab in Chicago.

Image Credits: EeroQ

“We’re the only company that is pursuing electrons and helium — and electrons and helium, it’s an almost identical system to silicon spin qubits. […] The only difference is that what we’re trying to do is, instead of having the single electron spin be embedded inside this silicon — which has all types of possible defects — [ours] actually floats on top of a layer of liquid helium. The really cool thing here, just from a pure science effective, is that the electron is attracted to its own image and therefore it’s trapped naturally,” EeroQ CEO Nick Farina explained. Ideally, this means that EeroQ’s design will have all of the benefits of spin qubits, including their long coherence time, with the advantage of having a system that can be scaled up more easily. And while noise will always be an issue for any quantum computer design, the electron-on-helium design offers some natural resistance by default. There’s a reason, after all, why the current time in quantum computing is typically called the ‘noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ)’ era.

Image Credits: EeroqQ

“I think there are multiple valid ways to build a quantum computer,” Farina said. “And I think that in the NISQ era, over the next five years by the middle of the decade, you’re going to see multiple success stories of creating real customer value using different types of qubits. I think there’s a point at which scalability will start to separate the field.”

That’s obviously also what EeroQ’s investors are betting on. The company’s seed round was led by B Capital’s Ascent Fund, with participation from V Capital, Alumni Ventures, Unbound Ventures, Calibrate Ventures and Red Cedar Ventures. B Capital’s chair Howard Morgan and its senior principal Morgan Polotan will join the company’s board.

In an interview, Howard Morgan noted that he has had a long interest in quantum computing but it wasn’t until B Capital’s new Ascent Fund closed earlier this year that he had a vehicle for making these more adventurous early-stage investments. “We started talking about Nick [Farina] and what they were doing. And we started to dig in and I realized that it was one of the only very differentiated technologies. It was not going down the paths that all the other people have gone down. It was developed with Michigan State and Princeton University and we had a way to pretty much lock up all the patents and all the intellectual property, so we could work on it because everybody else was ignoring it completely,” Morgan said and added that the promise of the technology’s scalability was also a major reason why the firm decided to invest.

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Google’s ‘quantum supremacy’ usurped by researchers using ordinary supercomputer

Back in 2019, Google proudly announced that they had achieved what quantum computing researchers had sought for years: proof that the esoteric technique could outperform traditional ones. But this demonstration of “quantum supremacy” is being challenged by researchers claiming to have pulled ahead of Google on a relatively normal supercomputer.

To be clear, no one is saying Google lied or misrepresented its work — the painstaking and groundbreaking research that led to the quantum supremacy announcement in 2019 is still hugely important. But if this new paper is correct, the classical vs. quantum computing competition is still anybody’s game.

You can read the full story of how Google took quantum from theory to reality in the original article, but here’s the very short version. Quantum computers like Sycamore are not better than classical computers at anything yet, with the possible exception of one task: simulating a quantum computer.

It sounds like a cop-out, but the point of quantum supremacy is to show the method’s viability by finding even one highly specific and weird task that it can do better than even the fastest supercomputer. Because that gets the quantum foot in the door to expand that library of tasks. Perhaps in the end all tasks will be faster in quantum, but for Google’s purposes in 2019, only one was, and they showed how and why in great detail.

Now, a team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences led by Pan Zhang has published a paper describing a new technique for simulating a quantum computer (specifically, certain noise patterns it puts out) that appears to take a tiny fraction of the time estimated for classical computation to do so in 2019.

Not being a quantum computing expert nor a statistical physics professor myself, I can only give a general idea of the technique Zhang et al used. They cast the problem as a large 3D network of tensors, with the 53 qubits in Sycamore represented by a grid of nodes, extruded out 20 times to represented the 20 cycles the Sycamore gates went through in the simulated process. The mathematical relationships between these tensors (each its own set of interrelated vectors) was then calculated using a cluster of 512 GPUs.

An illustration from Zhang’s paper showing a visual representation of the 3D tensor array they used to simulate Sycamore’s quantum operations.

In Google’s original paper, it was estimated that performing this scale of simulation on the most powerful supercomputer available at the time (Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory) would take about 10,000 years — though to be clear, that was their estimate for 54 qubits doing 25 cycles. 53 qubits doing 20 is considerably less complex but would still take on the order of a few years by their estimate.

Zhang’s group claims to have done it in 15 hours. And if they had access to a proper supercomputer like Summit, it might be accomplished in a handful of seconds — faster than Sycamore. Their paper will be published in the journal Physical Review Letters; you can read it here (PDF).

These results have yet to be fully vetted and replicated by those knowledgeable about such things, but there’s no reason to think it’s some kind of error or hoax. Google even admitted that the baton may be passed back and forth a few times before supremacy is firmly established, since it’s incredibly difficult to build and program quantum computers while classical ones and their software are being improved constantly. (Others in the quantum world were skeptical of their claims to begin with, but some are direct competitors.)

As University of Maryland quantum scientist Dominik Hangleiter told Science, this isn’t a black eye for Google or a knockout punch for quantum in general by any means: “The Google experiment did what it was meant to do, start this race.”

Google may well strike back with new claims of its own — it hasn’t been standing still either — and I’ve contacted the company for comment. But the fact that it’s even competitive is good news for everyone involved; this is an exciting area of computing and work like Google’s and Zhang’s continues to raise the bar for everyone.

Quantum computing’s ‘Hello World’ moment

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World Fund joins $128M bet that quantum can deliver climate breakthroughs

World Fund, a newcomer in climate-VC land, is taking the lead in a $128 million round for IQM, with hopes the Finnish quantum computing company will one day deliver carbon cuts by the megatonne.

Quantum computing trades the bits of conventional computers for quantum bits, and in theory, quantum machines may be better suited for solving some highly complex problems in fields like chemistry and machine learning. IQM argues its tech could also move the needle on climate, but there is cause to be skeptical of the industry on the whole; we’ve seen a lot of hype around quantum computing startups, and yet the field mostly remains stuck in labs today.

Still, IQM projects its quantum computers will help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in as soon as the next three to five years “for some of the early use-cases.” The company says it is already “working on novel approaches to develop better battery solutions with a leading car manufacturer,” and it plans to spend its new funds on further research in battery tech, quantum chemistry and other areas. IQM cautioned in an email to TechCrunch that “scientific breakthroughs don’t follow a set timeline.”

The idea of applying quantum tech to climate change mitigation apparently isn’t all that far-fetched. Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich said in an email to TechCrunch that he “[believes] quantum computing can help with climate change, specifically with the carbon capture challenge (carbon fixation).” Microsoft’s research includes digging into how quantum computing can uncover “more efficient” ways to convert carbon dioxide into other chemical compounds.

World Fund and IQM’s other investors have also implicitly endorsed the idea via their checkbooks. In a statement, the German VC said it exclusively backs tech with the potential to remove “100 million tonnes” — that is, 100 megatonnes — “of carbon from the atmosphere yearly by 2040.” Other investors in the latest round include the EU’s European Innovation Council and Tencent. The deal brings IQM’s post-money valuation near the $1 billion mark, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

Some quantum computing companies have faced accusations of exaggerating their progress. Maryland-based IonQ has talked up its advances in quantum computing, but activist investor Scorpion Capital recently accused the company of fraud, calling its tech a “useless toy that can’t even add 1+1.” IonQ’s founders pushed back on the accusations, saying they were “amused at the extreme level of ignorance behind this attack.” In a related field, former staffers at British quantum encryption company Arqit reportedly questioned the usefulness and maturity of its quantum tech.

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IBM hopes a new error mitigation technique will help it get to quantum advantage

It felt like for a long time, the quantum computing industry avoided talking about ‘quantum advantage’ or ‘quantum supremacy,’ the point where quantum computers can solve problems that would simply take too long to solve on classical computers. To some degree, that’s because the industry wanted to avoid the hype that comes with that, but IBM today brought back talk about quantum advantage again by detailing how it plans to use a novel error mitigation technique to chart a path toward running the increasingly large circuits it’ll take to reach this goal — at least for a certain set of algorithms.

It’s no secret that quantum computers hate nothing more than noise. Qubits are fickle things, after all, and the smallest change in temperature or vibration can make them decohere. There’s a reason the current era of quantum computing is associated with ‘noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) technology.

The engineers at IBM and every other quantum computing company are making slow but steady strides toward reducing that noise on the hardware and software level, with IBM’s 65-qubit systems from 2020 now showing twice the coherence time compared to when they first launched, for example. The coherence time of IBM’s transmon superconducting qubits is now over 1ms. That may not sound like much — and some other companies have shown

But IBM is also taking another approach but betting on new error mitigation techniques, dubbed probabilistic error cancellation and zero noise extrapolation. At a very basic level, you can almost think of this as the quantum equivalent of the active noise cancellation in your headphones. The system regularly checks the system for noise and then essentially inverts those noisy circuits to enable it to create virtually error-free results.

IBM has now shown that this isn’t just a theoretical possibility but actually works in its existing systems. One disadvantage here is that there is quite a bit of overhead when you constantly sample these noisy circuits and that overhead is exponential in the number of qubits and the circuit depths. But that’s a tradeoff worth making, argues Jerry Chow, the Director of Hardware Development for IBM Quantum.

“Error mitigation is about finding ways to deal with the physical errors in certain ways, by learning about the errors and also just running quantum circuits in such a way that allows us to cancel them,” explained Chow. “In some ways, error correction is like the ultimate error mitigation, but the point is that there are techniques that are more near term with a lot of the hardware that we’re building that already provide this avenue. The one that we’re really excited about is called probabilistic error cancellation. And that one really is a way of trading off runtime — trading off running more circuits in order to learn about the noise that might be inherent to the system that is impacting your calculations.”

The system essentially inserts additional gates into existing circuits to sample the noise inherent in the system. And while the overhead increases exponentially with the size of the system, the IBM team believes it’s a weaker exponential than the best classical methods to estimate those same circuits.

As IBM previously announced, it plans to introduce error mitigation and suppression techniques into its Qiskit Runtime by 2024 or 2025 so developers won’t even have to think about these when writing their code.

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UK’s Oxford Quantum Circuits snaps up $47M for quantum-computing-as-a-service

Quantum computing has been making quantum leaps of progress in the last several years — going from theoretical concept to multiple testing environments, to help organizations prep for a time when quantum computers, and their unparalleled processing power, become a scaled reality. Now, UK-based Oxford Quantum Circuits is announcing £38 million ($47 million) in funding to fuel the growth of its own contribution to the space — a patented 3D processor architecture it calls Coaxmon, plus quantum-computing-as-a-service that will run on it. OQC says that this Series A is the largest to date for a UK-based quantum computing startup.

“We work at pace, and our systems are being optimized. We’ll continue to scale and reduce error rates,” said Ilana Wisby, OQC’s founding CEO, in an interview. “Our vision is seamless quantum access.”

Lansdowne Partners and The University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners (UTEC) a deep tech fund out of Japan, are co-leading the round, with British Patient Capital, Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE) and Oxford Investment Consultants (OIC) also participating. OSE and OIC previously led a £2.2 million seed round into the startup, which began life as a spinout from Oxford University and work done there by quantum physicist (and OQC founder) Dr Peter Leek.

The plan will be to use the funding to keep hiring more talent (it’s now at 60 employees), continue improving accessibility to quantum computing for developers interested in working with it, and to continue building out its computing infrastructure, which today is based on an 8-qubit machine. And as you might guess from the investor list, it will also be using some of the funds to expand into Asia Pacific, and specifically Japan, to tap would-be customers there in financial services and beyond.

“Quantum computing promises to be the next frontier of innovation, and OQC, with its state-of-the-art Coaxmon technology, aims to integrate the forefront of modern physics into our everyday lives,” said Lenny Chin, a principal at UTEC, in a statement. “UTEC is honoured to be part of OQC’s mission of making quantum technology accessible to all and will support OQC’s expansion into Asia-Pacific through collaborations with academia including the University of Tokyo, and partnerships with Japan’s leading financial and tech corporations.”

Wisby told me that OQC actually started raising this Series A before the pandemic, back in early 2020; but it opted to shelve that process and go for grants instead to build out the company in its earlier phases.

That got OQC quite far, advancing from a 1-qubit, to a 2-qubit, then a 4-qubit, and now currently an 8-qubit machine.

The startup is also already providing services to a variety of customers who work across either OQC’s private cloud or via Amazon Braket, AWS’s quantum computing platform that also provides developers access to other quantum-as-a-service providers such as Rigetti, IonQ and D-Wave. (OQC notes that its quantum computer, named Lucy, is the first European quantum provider on Braket — a key detail for companies and quantum researchers based out of Europe who need to comply with data protection laws by keeping data and the processing of it local: this gives them a local option.)

Its customers include Cambridge Quantum, which runs its IronBridge cryptographic number generator on OQC’s computer; financial services companies; molecular dynamics researchers; government organizations and large multinationals with in-house R&D teams working on systems capable to be run on quantum machines when they are eventually spun up.

“Eventually” is the operative word here: the real promise of quantum computing is vast computing power, but there has yet to be a quantum computer built that can achieve that at scale without also producing a lot of errors.

But it seems that a lot of the hope these days is not on “if” but “when” that hurdle will be overcome. “We’re well past theory,” Wisby said.

That’s led to a big wave of both large tech players such as IBM, Amazon and Alphabet to get involved, as well as a number of smaller startups, and companies like Rigetti, IonQ and D-Wave that sit between those two poles. While there are some opting to build and sell quantum devices, the economics don’t make sense for most potential use cases, so for now the bigger efforts appear to be around quantum in the cloud: offering it as an infrastructure-free, use-as-you-need-it compute service.

Although Oxford Quantum Circuits’ 8-qubit computer is not the largest in the field, Wisby said that one reason it’s picking up users, and this investment in what has been a tough fundraising climate, is because its platform is better, in that it produces less faults than others.

“We’re all working towards larger scale processes,” Wisby said. But, she added, there is something to be said for better quality and less errors. “We have low error rates, and the funding will enable us to deliver on the next steps.”

Another major fillip in the process is the fact that regions, and countries, are looking to back leaders in the field early on to help cement their respective standing in that next generation of technology, and so backing Oxford Quantum Circuits is seen to be part of that strategy. British Patient Capital is a strategic backer in that regard: it’s the investment arm of the British Business Bank, which is a government-owned bank focused on developing business and industry in the U.K.

“Since launching the UK’s first commercially-available quantum computer, we have continued to be highly impressed with both the technical developments and also the future ambitions of OQC,” said Peter Davies, partner and head of developed markets strategy at Lansdowne Partners, in a statement. “We are very excited to be investing in this innovative and forward-thinking company.”