News Brief

ColdQuanta has issued a press release that describes its progress in 2021. Key metrics include a 140% growth in bookings and a 70% growth in headcount. In addition, their progress occurred on many fronts including new customers contracts, new members of their leadership team, new partnerships, and new technical milestones. Many of these milestones had previously been reported last year in the Quantum Computing Report. You can view ColdQuanta's news release summarizing many of the key developments at the company in 2021 here. February 2, 2022

Multiverse Computing has announced a partnership with Xanadu to utilize PennyLane software as a core element for much of its software. PennyLane is a hardware agnostic, open source quantum software platform that provides a dedicated library for quantum machine learning. Use of this software will improve the speed and make it easier for Multiverse and its financial industry clients to develop applications. Although PennyLane will be utilized for many of Multiverse's products, they do have some others that work with D-Wave's quantum annealer and Tensor Networks. The PennyLane library won't be in use for these right now because PennyLane doesn't interface [...]

One of the techniques being explored by many quantum hardware providers to increase the number of usable qubits is to create a cluster of multiple quantum processor units (QPUs) and network them together in a mini quantum internet. This strategy follows a similar pattern that was pioneered in classical computing over 30 years ago. However, developing software that takes advantage of this type of configuration can be a challenging problem, but Entangled Networks is working on both hardware and software solutions to make this happen. They have just announced their first product called MultiQopt which is a multi-QPU compiler that provides [...]

Agnostiq, a Toronto based quantum software company, has released Covalent, a workflow orchestration platform which is designed to make it easier for users to utilize the capabilities of quantum processors as well as classical high performance computing hardware. It will break workflows down into modular Python components to allow users to easily reproduce repetitive code and avoid costly reruns and it includes an intelligent task scheduler that automatically selects the best hardware resource for a given task based on a mix of predefined as well as user-defined constraints. Because the software is open source, a user can more easily integrate a variety [...]

The funding round was led by Addition, with participation from existing investors Oxford Science Enterprises (formerly OSI) and Crane. PQShield is headquartered in Oxford, UK and specializes in providing solutions for Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC). Their products include a post-quantum System-on-a-Chip (SOC) crypto co-processor design, a cryptographic SDK for mobile and server technologies, and a toolkit for messaging platforms and apps to ensure the privacy and long-lasting confidentiality of sensitive data. The company has been participating in the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization process and they are the authors of several of the NIST PQC finalist algorithms. The company currently has employees in the UK, United States, [...]

The round was led by Quantonation with additional participation from previous investors UVC Partners, btov Industrial Technologies and High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF). HQS Quantum Simulations develops quantum algorithms to predict molecular properties for performance materials, specialty chemicals and pharmaceutical companies. In addition, they have developed software that can initially be run on classical computers but can be transferred to quantum computers once more powerful quantum computers are available. They are part of the Q-Exa consortium which aims to install in the first quantum computer manufactured in Germany at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre by the end of this year. They will use the [...]

The new center was announced by Virginia Tech President Tim Sands and will be located on their campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It will complement another Center of Quantum Architecture and Software Development on the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus located in Alexandria, Virginia. The center will unite quantum research across disciplines and will initially include sixteen Virginia Tech faculty providing multidisciplinary expertise in physics, mathematics, computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and material science. Some of the goals of the new center will be to strengthen Virginia Tech proposals for large center-scale grants and raise the visibility of this work, facilitate new partnerships, [...]

The project will be 74.8 percent funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with the remaining budget covered by the consortium partners and it is expected to run through November 30, 2024. Key activities will be to develop growth processes for diamond substrates of high purity and quality as well as develop precision manufacturing techniques for fabricating scalable arrays of diamond (also known as NV center) qubits. Other important activities will be to develop mechanisms for the selective initialization, read-out, and manipulation of qubits in quantum computers with multiple processor nodes. Founded in 2019, Quantum Brilliance is an Australian-German [...]

The Quantum Open Source Foundation (QOSF) and the Unitary Fund have announced Victory Omole, a software engineer at Super.tech, as the winner of the 2021 Wittek Quantum Prize for Open Source Software for his outstanding contributions to Cirq and other open-source projects. He was selected after review of 38 nominations from all over the world. Three runners up were also announced including (in no particular order) Kesha Hietala who led the design of the SQIR quantum programming language, Paul Nation who co-created QuTiP and Robert Smith who started the Quil ecosystem and open-sourced large parts of the Rigetti software stack. The Wittek prize is a yearly award that was established [...]

The Quantum Technologies Industrial (QuTI) ecosystem project will develop new components, manufacturing and testing solutions and algorithms for the needs of quantum technology. It will be coordinated by VTT Finland and include eleven additional partners from research, academia, and industry including Aalto University, Tampere University and CSC – IT Center for Science, and the industrial partners are Bluefors, Afore, Picosun, IQM Quantum Computers, Rockley Photonics, Quantastica, Saab, and Vexlum. The project will last for three years and €5.6 million of the budget will be partially funded by Business Finland, a public organization under the Finnish Ministry of Employment and the Economy. The [...]