News Brief

Q.Ant is a quantum startup based in Stuttgart, Germany that is developing both quantum sensors and quantum computing chips based upon their room temperature lithium niobate based photonic technology. The Institute of Microelectronics Stuttgart (IMS CHIPS) is a research institute for microelectronics that is part of the Baden-Württemberg Innovation Alliance. These organizations have signed an agreement to jointly produce quantum chips. Q.Ant will be contributing €14 million ($15.2M USD) to the partnership in the form of machines, process technology, and production expertise. IMS CHIPS will be contributing its existing chip manufacturing infrastructure. The production will initially be small scale and used [...]

TRUMPF Venture, the venture capital arm of the TRUMPF Group, a German industrial machine manufacturing company, is investing one million Euros in HQS Quantum Simulation, a quantum software company, located in Karlsruhe, Germany. HQS Quantum Simulations was founded in 2017 as a spinoff from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and develops software to simulate quantum systems for modelling at the quantum level materials and their molecular properties. HQS has a unique approach for these simulations. Rather than using variational approaches, their software software’s architecture utilizes open quantum mechanical systems that interact with their environment, also called the bath, and utilize [...]

Iberdrola is a large multinational electrical utility company headquartered in Bilbao, Spain with over €53 billion ($58B USD) in revenue in 2022. They are also  the biggest producer of wind power and the world's second electricity utility by market capitalization. As a step in exploring how quantum technology can be leveraged in their business, they have chosen the problem figuring out the best way of optimizing the number, characteristics, and locations of batteries within their smart power grid. This is an important consideration for systems using wind and solar renewable energy, but is also a very computational complex problem to solve. Iberdrola [...]

After winning a U.S. Air Force SBIR Phase III award last year, QuSecure has received another SBIR award from the U.S. government. This award from the U.S. Army will focus on developing quantum safe solutions to be used in tactical edge and IoT devices that could be deployed on the battlefield. Although QuSecure has not released the exact amount of the award but they did indicate the award allotment will be upwards of $2 million. A press release provided by QuSecure announcing this award is available here. June 10, 2023

We reported earlier this year about a beta release of a new open source software development kit (SDK) from Quantum Brilliance that could be used with the NV diamond based quantum accelerators they are developing. Rather than being used as standalone quantum processors, the quantum accelerators are designed to be deeply integrated within HPC centers to support hybrid classical/quantum processing. The SDK supports fully integrated C++ and Python API as well as NVIDIA CUDA features and customizable noise models for the built-in high performance emulator called Qristal Emulator. The company has now released this software for general availability and it can be [...]

Haiqu is a new quantum software startup that was originally incubated in the Fall 2022 quantum stream of the Creative Destruction Lab. Their goal is to bring NISQ to life by providing an advanced quantum software layer that will enable  scalable quantum applications to run on a modern noisy quantum hardware. They have an internationally based founding team with members based in the United States, Ukraine, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland. The $4M pre-seed round was  led by MaC Venture Capital, with additional participation from Toyota Ventures, SOMA capital, u.ventures, SID Venture Partners, Roosh Ventures and private investments from Paul Holland, Alexi Kirilenko, and Gordy Holterman. The company has [...]

Diagram of How POLARISqb's QuADD. Credit: POLARISqb Discovering a new drug has traditionally taken decades long and cost multiple millions of dollars. The reason is that when companies may have a potentially drug library of about 1030 candidate molecules and will want to test which one of these is most effective with a specific protein binding pocket and ligand. Previously this was accomplished by empirical testing candidates in the lab or computer aided drug discovery (CADD) using conventional computers. The lab testing is very costly and time consuming while the CADD approach is also very time consuming. POLARISqb is now providing [...]

The company will be located in the city of Hefei in Anhui province, China and will work to further develop the technology and promote its adoption. China Telecom has already been working to develop quantum communications technology and has already help form five quantum communication standards, a quantum security service platform, and created a Hefei quantum secure communication metro network. In addition, they have already launched a 5G phone that supports quantum safe encryption which already has nearly 500,000 users. Additional information about this new quantum subsidiary of China Telecom is available in a news report from Reuters that can be [...]

D-Wave Quantum Inc. has announced it will partners with the Interpublic Group (IPG), one of the world's largest advertising and marketing companies with 2022 revenue of $10.9 billion, to use D-Wave's quantum technology for optimizing marketing campaigns. There is a large amount of data and parameters associated with advertising campaigns including the myriad number of places an ad can be placed, cost to place an ad, viewer demographics, response rates, etc. and companies like Interpublic constantly work to analyze the data to provide the best results for their clients. They will be using D-Wave's hybrid classical/quantum solution and the D-Wave's Leap [...]

The new platform is the result of work performed by the  Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences (BAQIS), Institute of Physics (IOP) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Tsinghua University and was announced at the 2023 Zhongguancun Forum in Beijing at the end of May. The platform consists of three chips of 136, 18, and 10 qubits and can be programmed with both an open quantum assembly language and also a graphical user interface. The organizations indicated that they have already been supporting 2000 early users since November and those users have run over 500,000 jobs since that time. A [...]