dougfinke

QpiAI, a vertically integrated quantum and AI technology firm, has secured $32 million USD (INR 279 crore) in Series A funding. The round was led by Avataar Ventures and India’s National Quantum Mission (NQM), with participation from both new and existing investors. Founded by Dr. Nagendra Nagaraja, QpiAI has developed a proprietary full-stack quantum computing platform combining custom hardware and advanced software aimed at real-world enterprise applications. The company’s current deployments span domains such as materials science and drug discovery and include customers from global automotive and life sciences sectors. QpiAI’s team includes more than two dozen Ph.D. researchers with backgrounds [...]

By George Likourezos, Esq. For quantum technology companies, protecting intellectual property (IP) is essential for safeguarding innovations, securing market advantages, and attracting investors. As these companies strive to bring new technologies—such as quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum communications—to market, patent protection becomes one of their most valuable assets. Two key tools in optimizing the patenting process are the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Track One program and the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH). These strategies provide faster, more efficient patent examination processes, which are particularly beneficial for companies in fast-moving industries like quantum technologies, where time-to-market is critical. Track One: [...]

By Doug Finke When I was a young product manager at Intel, the corporate executives used to teach classes to the employees on a variety of topics to improve their skills. I remember taking the Constructive Confrontation course from Andy Grove was really striking. But one course I think that is still very relevant for today's quantum industry was a course on marketing given by Bill Davidow who was VP of Marketing at the time and later started the Mohr Davidow Venture firm. When I took the course, Bill’s main thesis was that technology companies that want to be successful shouldn’t [...]

Schematic Picture of a Tetron Showing the Hybrid Nanowires, Backbone, Quantum Dots, & Junctions (left)and a Simplified Diagram of it (right) Microsoft has just released a technical paper showing progress they have made with their topological qubit research since the APS meeting last March. Specifically, they have performed single-shot interferometric measurements of the fermion parity for the two loops designed into the tetron structure. These measurements implement Pauli-X and Z measurements of the tetron, which are critical steps for the measurement-based quantum computer they are developing. The Pauli-X measurement is accomplished with a fermion parity measure along two places in a [...]

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 [...]