News Brief

Investcorp is a global private equity firm founded in Bahrain in 1982 with 510 employees and over $50 billion in Assets Under Management (AUM). Their investments range across a broad range of private equity, real estate, credit, and other areas. Last year they launched a global institutional blockchain fund from Abu Dhabi. They have invested an undisclosed amount in Terra Quantum. Terra Quantum has expertise in quantum security and quantum cryptography when can have uses for development of quantum resistant blockchain and other crypto algorithms. Besides providing Quantum Security as a Service which they consider as one of their core areas, [...]

Innogress will work with partner  GAN Tech. UK. to set up a quantum data center in Greater Noida. Noida is short for New Okhla Industrial Development Authority and is a satellite city of Delhi and is a part of the National Capital Region (NCR) of India. The data center will be called ‘IQDC’ standing for Indraprastha Quantum Data Center. It will join several other classical data centers that have been set up in the Noida/Greater Noida area. Innogress also has another project to set up a quantum technology park called the Greater Karnavati Quantum Computing Technology Park (GKQCTP) in the Gujarat state of India. That project [...]

Nanofiber Quantum Technologies (NanoQT) is a quantum hardware startup located in Japan that is pursuing a technology of nanofiber-based Cavity QED (Quantum Electrodynamics) based upon research by Professor Takao Aoki of Waseda University's Faculty of Science and Engineering. The funding came from Waseda University Ventures, a new fund set up last year that specializes in startup investments in the deep tech area based upon research created at universities and other research institutes. This investment was made last August, but was only made public recently. NanoGT's Cavity QED (quantum electrodynamics) technology is a hybrid system of atoms and light. It can provide [...]

Cybertrust has integrated the Quantum Origin quantum random number generator (QRNG) product from Quantinuum into their certificate issuance and distribution platform for use by IoT (Internet of Things) devices. Cybertrust is Japan's first commercial certificate authority and will use this technology along with the NIST-selected post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms for the certificates that IoT devices use to authenticate their connection to other devices. The Quantum Origin product uses quantum mechanical principles to develop very strong non-deterministic random numbers that can be used as cryptography keys. It is a cloud-hosted platform that makes it easy for an end user to use and [...]

This investment funding for Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) follows a £38 Million ($46M USD) Series A round that they raised last year. The investors include Quantum Exponential whose portion was £299,997 and also Japanese private equity firm HiJoJo Partners. The funds will be used by OQC for R&D and also to expand the company's effort in Asia with a focus on Japan. OQC currently has available an 8 qubit processor named "Lucy" which uses their proprietary 3D Coaxmon technology and Lucy can be accessed through Amazon Braket or OQC's own private quantum cloud. The company is also partnering with Cyxtera install [...]

Several quantum industry consortiums have been established in the past few years to help promote the advancement of quantum technology within their country or geographic reason. Four of them have been meeting together informally for over a year and have now signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to establish the International Council of Quantum Industry Associations to have a more formal structure. The consortiums include Quantum Industry Canada (QIC) in Canada, the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) in the U.S., the Quantum Strategic industry Alliance for Revolution (Q-STAR) in Japan, and the Quantum Industry Consortium (QuIC) in Europe. Each of the consortiums has similar [...]

SandboxAQ has won a Direct-to-Phase-II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) from the U.S. Air Force to research and develop a quantum navigation sensor that can be used in GPS-denied environments. Phase II SBIR's typically are awarded in amounts up to $1,000,000 and typically last 24 months. SandboxAQ has been working on ultra-sensitive magnetic sensors that could potentially detect minute changes in the earth's magnetic field in different locations. By creating a map that records the magnetic fields ahead of time, an airplane flying over a particular area can later sense the field and compare it with the information on the map. [...]

TuringQ is a quantum startup in Shanghai, China that is developing photonic based quantum processors and an associated quantum operating system. They were formed in February 2021. Although the specific amount of funding wasn't made public, it was characterized to be in the hundreds of millions of yuan, which would likely equate to somewhere between $15 and $100 million USD. The investors included the China Internet Investment Fund, Tsinghua Holdings Capital, Lenovo Capital & Incubator Group, and Orient Securities. This round of funding follows earlier Pre-A+ funding rounds that totaled 500 million yuan ($73 million USD). The funds will be used [...]

The projects include development of next generation materials and architectures for superconducting qubits, solid state quantum simulators, quantum sensors, quantum optomechanical sensors for improving measurements of optical decay, and others. The projects can have a duration of up to three years and were selected through a competitive DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement titled Quantum Horizons: QIS Research and Innovation for Nuclear Science. A news release announcing the award funding is available on the DOE website here and a list of the awardees and their project can be seen here. January 28, 2023

Arrow Electronics is one of the world's largest distributors of electronic components and related services with over 20,000 employees and 2021 revenue of about $34.5 billion. They have over 220,000 commercial and federal channel partners and will work through these channels and QuSecure to distribute QuSecure's QuProtect quantum security solution to help customers secure their IT systems from quantum attacks on their encrypted communications. They will be the first large technology distributor to broadly offer a PQC (Post Quantum Security) solution. More information about QuSecure and their agreement with Arrow is can be found in a press release available here. January 28, 2023