News Brief

We reported last year on how the Netherland's Quantum Delta NL (QDNL) was planning on opening dedicated buildings, called "House of Quantum" intended to house researchers and companies focusing on quantum technologies. These locations will contain high end labs and testbeds that different quantum companies can share and allowing them to reduce their capital costs of setting these up on their own. They may also benefit by having other quantum focused companies and organizations in the same location to share ideas and provide encouragement. QDNL has announced the opening of its first building of this type called Elektroncaweg in Delft. The [...]

Quside, a company in Barcelona, Spain that provides Quantum Random Number Generators (QRNG)s, has raised a seven-digit series A round. The investors include the investment branch of Trumpf, an industrial manufacturer of photonic components, Bullnet Capital, a deep tech investor in Spain, Demium Capital, and TechVisionCapital. The funds will be used for expanding their customer base in high-end markets and scaling up its production capabilities. In the next few weeks, the company will be making additional announcements of new partners, customers, and advisors, as well as new product announcements for high-performance computing customers. Additional information about this funding is available in a [...]

In order to make it easier for customers to try out Quantum Computing Inc.'s (QCI) recently introduced Dirac 1 Entropy Quantum Computer, the company has announced a free software translator that can take problems expressed as an Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) format and convert to a Hamiltonian that can be an input to the Dirac 1 for solution. This is important for QCI because many D-Wave problems are formulated as QUBO problems. The software can handle problems with up to 10,000 variables and this will allow customers to make a comparison of the performance and solution accuracy between D-Wave's quantum [...]

Although both Classiq and Q-CTRL are quantum software startups, they have been focusing on completely different areas of the quantum stack. Classiq offers a software package that allows users to specify their program using  high-level functional models and then automatically compiles them into lower level quantum gates. While Q-CTRL provides quantum control infrastructure software that can optimize and implement the gates to achieve error mitigation to provide the highest possible accuracy in the calculations. The software achieves this by designing the necessary control pulses and other techniques to minimize noise and decoherence to achieve the lowest possible error rate. The companies [...]

SandboxAQ, a quantum software startup spun off from Alphabet Inc. earlier this year, has won a Phase 1 SBIR for the U.S. Air Force to investigate who its suite of software solutions can protect the Air Force and Space Force data networks from quantum attacks. Phase 1 SBIR awards have typical amounts of about $225,000 for programs that last 6-12 months. The activities that SandboxAQ will perform will include conducting post-quantum cryptographic inventory analysis and performance benchmarking. You can read SandboxAQ's press release announcing this award on their website here. November 20, 2022

Pasqal, a quantum startup company developing neutral atom based quantum processors with headquarters near Paris France, has announced it is collaborating with Italian energy giant Eni to explore potential quantum solutions for a number of applications across its value chain including what they call the upstream, downstream, chemicals and renewables. Eni already operates one of the world's most powerful privately-owned supercomputers in Eni's Green Data Centre and the companies will work together to see how quantum computing can work together with Eni's classical computing resources to enhance and accelerate the solution of important problems in Eni's business. Eni has a long [...]

In what it says is the first quantum cloud service in Europe, Quandela has announced that it has now made available an initial system with 5 photonic qubits for experimentation. The system can be programmed with Quandela's Percival development toolkit which also supports Quandela's photonic simulator allowing a user to simulate a program before running it on the real machine. The company plans on upgrading the system to reach 12 qubits by the end of 2023. The service was tested out recently in a quantum hackathon at the Sorbonne which had over 60 researchers and students participating. A user can try [...]

IonQ announced their third quarter financial results and indicated they are on-track for meeting their previous full year 2022 estimates for both revenue and bookings. The revenue in Q3 was $2.8 million, up from the previous $2.6 million they reported in Q2. Bookings in Q3 were $16.4 million which includes the $13.4 million dollar contract that we reported on in September. Adjusted EBITDA loss was $13.4 million which is an increase from Q2's $11.6 million. And cash, cash equivalents, and investment at the end of the quarter were $555.8 million, a decrease from $571.3 million at the end of Q2. In [...]

Xanadu's Series C financing follows a Series B venture investment in May 2021 that was also for $100 million bringing the total amount invested so far to $250 million with a company valuation of $1 billion. The round was led by Georgian with additional participation from Porsche Automobil Holding SE, Forward Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Pegasus Tech Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, and previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Capricorn, BDC Capital, and Tim Draper. The funding will be used to help advance the company's progress towards their goal of building a fault-tolerant and error-corrected quantum computer that can scale up to one million [...]

Quix Quantum, a startup developing photonic quantum processors formed in 2019, announced the opening of a new office in Amsterdam, Netherlands. This new office complements their original office in Enschede, Netherlands near the University of Twente and another office in Ulm, Germany working on DLR’s Quantum Computing Initiative. A key motivation for the company is to make it easier to establish strategic relationships and access talent at other organizations in the Amsterdam area working on quantum technology including  QuSoft, The University of Amsterdam, the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, and Quantum.Amsterdam. For more, you can view a news release from Quix announcing [...]