News Brief

A few more management additions have been announced this month. Professor Michel Devoret has been appointed as a scientific board member and advisor at Alice & Bob. Professor Devoret is a Professor of Applied Physics at Yale University and has done pioneering work in the areas of superconducting qubits and error correction. Terra Quantum has appointed Dr. Florian Neukart as Chief Product Officer. He was previously the Director of Volkswagen’s Data Lab. And Marco Pagani has been appointed as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Quantropi. Mr. Pagani is the President and CEO of the Ottawa Community Foundation and [...]

QuintessenceLabs, a Canberra, Australia supplier of quantum cybersecurity solutions including quantum random number generators (QRNG) and quantum key distribution devices (QKD), has received $25 Million in a Series B funding round. The round was led by Main Sequence and TELUS Ventures with additional participation from Mizuho Financial Group-backed InterValley Ventures and Terry Snow’s Capital Property Group. The company is a spin-off from the Australian National University in Canberra and had previously received funding of $3.26 million AUD ($2.45M USD) and followed by an additional funding of $528 thousand ($396K USD) from the Australian Department of Defence. Among other uses, the company will [...]

Amazon had announced last year that it was building a new center for quantum computer research on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, California and they now have announced that its opening after a year of construction. The two-story 21,000 square foot (1950 square meters) facility will include office space, laboratories and everything needed for Amazon to make, test and operate quantum processors. Although Amazon is currently partnering with D-Wave, Rigetti and IonQ to offer quantum computing cloud services through their AWS platform, they are also busy designing their own superconducting based quantum computer with error correction. Although they have not released [...]

We reported on Quantum Machines raise of $50 million in a Series B round in September. They now have announced that Qualcomm Ventures will also become an investor in Quantum Machines as an extension to their Series B round. The amount of the investment was not disclosed. To our knowledge this is Quantum Ventures first investment in a quantum company. Overall they have invested in 150 portfolio companies around the world in companies working in the 5G, artificial intelligence, automotive, IoT, consumer, enterprise cloud areas. You can view Quantum Machines press release announcing this investment here. October 26, 2021

Toshiba has developed a photonic integrated circuit solution that shrinks the core QKD functionality into three chips. Although these chips are still prototypes, they are built with standard semiconductor manufacturing process which could pave the way for future high volume production at competitive costs. The three chips are separated into the QTx transmitter chip, QRx receiver chip, and the QRNG quantum random number generator chip. They are capable of exchanging a thousand symmetric QKD codes per second over a 10 km fiber optic link. For more details about these chips, you can read a press release provided by Toshiba and available [...]

IonQ joins EY and The Mitre Corporation in supporting this new accelerator managed by the University of Maryland (UMD) for quantum startup companies. Perhaps this is not surprising as IonQ itself was a startup that spun out of quantum research activities at UMD. This activity is just one of many areas where IonQ and the University of Maryland are working together. In September, the two parties announced they will be partnering to create a National Quantum Lab (Q-Lab) with $20 Million in funding from the university. Additional information about IonQ's collaborations with the university can be viewed in a news article [...]

Multiverse Computing is a quantum software company with headquarters in San Sebastian, Spain that specializes in providing quantum software solutions for the financial industry. Their flagship product is called Singularity that allows users to input their problem's parameters for applications such as portfolio optimization or fraud detection into a spreadsheet and then submit the spreadsheet for solution on a quantum computer. This funding round was led by JME Ventures with additional participation from Quantonation, EASO Ventures, Inveready, CLAVE Capital (Mondragón Fondo de Promoción), Ikerlan, LKS, Penja Strategy, Seed Gipuzkoa and Ezten Venture Capital Fund. This follows an earlier pre-seed round of 1.5 [...]

The Midwest I-Corps Node, in partnership with the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Duality, is offering a Jumpstart workshop that will help teams explore the commercial viability of quantum technologies, including hardware and software solutions as well as quantum-enabling technologies. The workshop will consist of four two hour session from November 2 to December 14 that will provide guidance to teams on how they can learn customer pain points, build connections to a commercial ecosystem, assess the size of their potential market and develop a commercialization roadmap. Participants will be eligible to receive [...]

The Berlin Senate is funding this effort with €25 million over a five year period. The funds will be split with €15 million to be used for basic research and €10 million to be used for applied research. The activities will focus on both quantum software including basic research and industry related applications as well as quantum hardware, in particular photonic quantum enabling technologies. The Berlin Quantum Alliance (BQA) is based upon a concept developed by the Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, Technical University of Berlin, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications (HHI). Additional [...]

The Economic and Security Implications of Quantum Science (ESIX) subcommittee of the U.S. National Science & Technology Council (NSTC) has issued a report with recommendations on how the U.S. can work with foreign talent to help advance the quantum industry. It is important to provide a balance between supporting an open innovation ecosystem with protecting national security. The report asserts that there is a continuing shortage of quantum trained individuals worldwide and it is important to grow this workforce in order for the U.S. to retain leadership in this technology. Key recommendations from the report including the following: 1) The United [...]