dougfinke

Quantonation Ventures revealed the initial closing of its second early-stage investment fund, Quantonation II, with €70 million ($75M USD) raised towards a €200 million ($214M USD) goal. Focused on Quantum Technologies, the fund underscores Quantonation's leading role in the burgeoning Quantum Tech industry, with investments already being made globally. Since its inception in 2018, Quantonation has backed founders translating quantum science and physics into real-world applications across sensing, communication, and computing.  Its first fund, Quantonation I, exceeded its target by securing €91 million ($97M USD), investing in 27 companies globally, and achieving two exits. This success places Quantonation in the top [...]

IBM Quantum System One Installation at RPI's Voorhees Computing Center. Credit: IBM We had reported last June that Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) had ordered an 127-qubit IBM Quantum 'Eagle' processor for on-premise use. Now IBM and RPI have announced that they've completed installation at RPI's Voorhees Computing Center, a facility which used to be a former cathedral. This is the first installation that IBM has performed at a university. IBM had previously installed a Quantum System One at the Cleveland Clinic last year. RPI will be using the machine to perform quantum computing research as well as train future quantum computing professionals. [...]

Infleqtion has named Matthew Kinsella as their new Chief Executive Officer replacing Scott Faris who has decided to leave the company to focus on quantum industry policy and investments in national security and defense. Mr. Kinsella was previously a senior Managing Director at Maverick Ventures and was one of the earliest investors in Infleqtion, when it was originally named ColdQuanta. He has served on the company's board since 2018 and knows the company well. He will be focusing on continuing to  scale Infleqtion's business and expand their sales into high-growth markets. A press release from Infleqtion announcing his appointment is available [...]

Chart Showing Improvement in Error Rates with this Latest Research. Credit: Quantinuum The race to achieve fault tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) will need many steps in order to cross the goal line and provide a usable capability so that end users can take advantage of it for their applications. But Quantinuum and Microsoft have moved the ball further downfield with their latest experiment. OverviewBasic quantum error correction groups together a bunch of error prone physical qubits with a coding scheme to form a logical qubit that shows a greatly decreased error rate. More advanced schemes increase the rate of encoding. A key [...]

For the full year of 2023, the company achieved revenue of $358 thousand versus revenue of $136 thousand in 2022. Net loss was Net loss was $29.73 million versus a 2022 loss of $38.59 million a year ago. The company ended the year with cash of about $2.06 million versus $5.308 million in 2022. Their financial report can be seen in the 10K report posted on the SEC website here. April 2, 2024

Nature Magazine Cover of the Issue with IBM's aLDPC Paper Showing the Torus Topologies Used in this Code. Credit: IBM IBM's Research in qLDPC Codes The popular press is buzzing with IBM's announcement that they have published an article about the research of qLDPC (Quantum Low Density Parity Check) codes in Nature magazine. But attentive readers of the Quantum Computing Report will note that we first reported about this last August when the preprint of this paper describing this research was first posted on the arXiv and again this last December in our article about IBM's roadmap. LDPC codes are a [...]

D-Wave Computing Inc. has just reported its Q4 2023 and full year 2023 financial results. While the numbers are important, the highlight of the report for us was that the company now has two customers in regular production usage of their cloud service with two additional ones scheduled to start in a few months. While the other quantum hardware providers have many customers doing experimentation, training or running proof-of-concepts, we are not aware of any other quantum company that has customers using their quantum systems in regular daily production. We will discuss this in more detail later in this article, but [...]

Zapata AI, formerly Zapata Computing, has publicly closed its merger with Andretti Acquisition Corporation and will start trading on the NASDAQ exchange with the symbol ZPTA on Monday, April 1, 2024. Zapata originally started as a quantum software company but has branched out to also work in the generative AI area. They still do work in quantum and indicate that they are leveraging this experience to provide generative AI solutions to companies in industries including telecommunications, financial services, transportation and logistics, biotech/pharmaceutical and life sciences, automotive OEMs, advanced global manufacturing, and defense and government. One of their key accounts is to [...]

Semiconductor Wafer Containing Spin Qubits. Credit: Diraq Although it may first appear that the difference between operating qubits at 15 millikelvin (0.015K) and 1 kelvin doesn't sound like very much, but for quantum computing it actually makes a world of difference. On one hand, the cooling power of the dilution refrigerators are more than an order of magnitude better at the higher temperature. The qubits and the associated control lines generate heat. Even though the heat generated from each qubit is small, it puts a limit on the number of qubits that can be cooled by the dilution refrigerator. For this [...]

The grant was provided by Bpifrance on behalf of the French government as part of the France 2030 initiative. Alice & Bob's partners in this effort include academic partners ENS de Lyon and Mines Paris - PSL. The project, named Cat Factory, will use Alice & Bob's Cat qubit technology which we recently described here which combines a base Cat qubit which virtually eliminates bit flips with an LDPC code to create a much more efficient implementation. To achieve 100 logical qubits, this projects intends to use just 1500 physical qubits that will be fitted into a large dilution refrigerator and [...]