dougfinke

As a secondary offering to the funding that SandboxAQ announced in April from Google, NVIDIA, Ray Dalio, and others, the company has raised an additional $95 Million from investors including Rizvi Traverse, Forge Global, and the Ava Family Office. The company has received total funding of almost $1 billion and has a current valuation of that is now over $5.6 billion. Although much of SandboxAQ's work is in the AI space, it also has efforts in the quantum sensor and quantum cybersecurity areas. Additional information is available in a blog posted on the SandboxAQ website here. July 11, 2025

The Dutch Kansen voor West (KvW) program has invested €1 million ($1.17M USD) in Project HAVIK, a collaborative initiative aimed at achieving state-of-the-art two-qubit gate fidelity. This project brings together three market leaders from Delft: QuantWare, Qblox, and Delft Circuits, with QuantWare leading the effort. Attaining high two-qubit gate fidelity is crucial for the performance of superconducting qubits, enabling complex quantum algorithms and quantum error correction. Project HAVIK addresses the entire quantum computing stack, with each company leveraging its unique expertise: QuantWare, a leading provider of scalable quantum processors, will focus on refining its qubit architecture to optimize control over qubit-qubit [...]

IBM has issued a new minor release, version 2.1, to its Qiskit Software Development Platform. As mentioned in our earlier report last April with the release of Qiskit 2.0, IBM will continue evolve this software to provide additional functionality and performance to improve the user experience. Sometimes when new releases are provided, they will have incompatibilities with application programs originally developed under an older version of Qiskit. However, IBM has indicated that this will not happen when there is a minor update such as this upgrade from 2.0 to 2.1. A key new feature in this release is the extension of [...]

Physicist Returns to First Love: Science Writing Overview At university, Kirsty McGhee studied physics but always liked writing a paper a little more than conducting an experiment. She worked at several industry-leading publications before landing at Qruise, a quantum machine learning startup. Now she is learning Python and writing the company’s experiment catalog. She and Veronica Combs, host of The Quantum Spin by HKA, talked about how collaborating with colleagues and using clear language are key to effective communication. 00:00 Introduction to Quantum Spin Season Four 00:29 Interview with Kirsty McGhee: Journey into Quantum Industry 02:15 Explaining Complex Topics to a [...]

As the quantum industry continues to grow and expanding the usage to more practical applications, the demand for a skilled quantum workforce is rapidly outstripping the current supply. The Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), has released a new report, Connecting the Dots: Quantum Learning through Experiential Activities and Practice, outlining key findings and recommendations to address this critical talent pipeline issue. The report, a culmination of insights from a workshop attended by experts from industry, government, and academia, emphasizes that existing educational systems are falling short in providing the hands-on, practical training required [...]

Diagrams Showing Two Different Approaches for Generating High-Fidelity Logical Non-Clifford Gates(Controlled Hadamard on Left, T-Gate using Code Switching on Right) We have reported in the QCR recently on several research projects to create quantum error correction codes (see here, here, here, and here), but one of the most significant challenges for implementing a full fault tolerant quantum computer is being able to robustly support a complete, universal gate set that could conceivably implement any quantum algorithm. It is one thing to create logical qubits using a specific error correction code, but it is another thing to be able to perform gate [...]

In a strategic move aimed at pushing the frontier of mineral exploration, Australian space and exploration tech firm Fleet Space Technologies has announced collaborations with three quantum sensing innovators: mDetect, Nomad Atomics, and DeteQt. These partnerships are designed to accelerate the development and integration of advanced quantum sensors into Fleet’s ExoSphere platform, a vertically integrated system for satellite-connected, AI-driven geophysical exploration. The initiative targets the growing demand for critical minerals essential to the energy transition and high-tech manufacturing. By incorporating muon tomography, quantum gravimetry, and diamond-based quantum magnetometry, Fleet aims to significantly enhance subsurface imaging resolution and reduce the need for [...]

National Labs: Turning Basic Research into Industry Solutions Overview What do you do with 450 scientists in 15 labs across the country? You take on the country’s biggest energy challenges and bolster national security in the process. This leadership role is one of Bert de Jong’s jobs at the Berkeley Lab. He leads the Quantum Systems Accelerator which pairs advanced quantum prototypes with algorithms as part of the National Quantum Initiative. Bert is also the Department Head for Computational Science. He discusses the vital role of America’s national labs in translating basic research into industry solutions on the latest episode of [...]

Conceptual Diagram of the Connectivity Required in Microsoft's QEC Code. Credit: Microsoft There have been a lot of announcements made recently about developments in quantum error code (QEC) research, so it might be worthwhile to review what are the desirable features of a good code: Low ratio of physical qubits to logical qubits for efficiency Significant improvement in error rates and ability to scale the level of improvement as the code size increases Fast logical cycle time including error decoding and correction to maximize processing speed Single shot decoding of the errors to minimize the logical cycle time Straight forward implementation [...]

We had reported in December 2023 that Infleqtion had been chosen by Japan’s Science and Technology Agency for the Quantum Moonshot program as the sole foreign quantum computing partner in the program. Since then they have been hard at work with researchers from Japan's Institute for Molecular Science (IMS) and others to design the system. Infleqtion has just completed constructing the unit at their facility in Boulder, Colorado and has now shipped it to IMS in Okazaki, Japan. The next step will be to complete the integration, assembly, and testing of the system at IMS. When this is complete the system is expected to [...]