QuEra Computing, a Boston area start-up that has been working on advancing error correction for quantum computing, announced it has raised more than $230 million in financing, including contributions from Google and the SoftBank Vision Fund.
This week’s announcement includes the all-cash investment from Google that QuEra first announced last October, according to Yuval Boger, chief commercial officer at QuEra, while SoftBank’s involvement was not revealed until now. The financing participants also included new investor Valor Equity Partners, and others who joined all of QuEra’s existing investors, including QVT Family Office, Safar Partners, in participating in the massive round.
The financing terms dictate that $60 million of the $230 million total “will be received in the near future upon satisfying a prerequisite funding condition, currently in progress.” QuEra declined to elaborate on whether that condition is related to achieving a technical milestone or a one more related to business or revenue achievements.
In a statement, QuEra said the funding will help it:
• Accelerate the development of fault-tolerant quantum computer technology.
• Rapidly expand its team of world-class scientists and engineers, with a focus on technical and scientific talent.
• Strengthening build and test capacity to scale up and meet growing demand for high-performance neutral-atom computers.
• Broaden its portfolio of co-design, cloud, and on-premises engagements with global research organizations, Fortune 500 companies, and government programs.
Building better qubits
QuEra has been focused on neutral-atom quantum computing and error correction techniques to make quantum computers more accurate, reliable, and efficient to operate. Its neutral-atom approach, involving laser-trapped atoms, contrasts with that of Google Quantum AI, which has been more focused on quantum computing using electrical circuits to create superconducting qubits. But, error correction is the great common denominator in the quantum sector, as virtually every player is looking to create more scalable, high-quality qubits that are key to increasing commercialization of quantum computers.
Error correction has been a major area of focus for Google’s quantum efforts, as QuEra’s Boger pointed out. He told Fierce Electronics in an interview, “Regardless of what modality you're using, a lot of companies share the same goal, which is to have lots of high quality qubits that can last for a long time. If you look at the Google roadmap, they talk about a long lived qubit, meaning: Let's take a single qubit and make lots and lots and lots of operations on it and error correct it.”
He continued, “The other side is scaling. A single qubit, of course, is useless. But, if I could get to 100 logical qubits and I could do a million operations with them, then this is getting really useful. And, whether you do it with superconducting or whether you do it with neutral atoms is details, but we share a lot of the same goals.”
Boger also said that because the quantum sector remains close to the academic roots that drive much of its innovation to date “there’s a ton of sharing” of information and methods between companies.
The SoftBank factor
The involvement of Japan’s SoftBank is intriguing because the company recently announced a partnership with Quantinuum, a firm majority-owned by Honeywell, around hybrid quantum-classical computing, and in general appears to be ramping up its quantum activities after a couple of relatively quiet years, with a particular focus around the intersection fo quantum computing and AI.
“The transformative potential of quantum computing is immense, and QuEra is uniquely positioned to make it accessible and impactful,” said Kentaro Matsui, Managing Partner of SoftBank Investment Advisers in a statement. “SoftBank Vision Fund is thrilled to invest in a company that is shaping the future of computation as the next step of AI.”
Japan, too, is ascending as an aspiring quantum computing superpower. While the US and China have been battling for global quantum leadership, Japan in the last year has been home to major projects integrating quantum computers with classical supercomputers. Notably, one of those projects–the construction of the Nvidia-built ABCI-Q supercomputer–involves a link to a QuEra quantum machine. Japan is becoming a large secondary market for QuEra after the US, Boger said.
What Jensen said
With $230 million in new financing committed to it, QuEra will not starve anytime soon, which could be significant as public debate continues about how soon quantum computing will be broadly commercialized. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in January that “very useful” quantum computers might be 20 years away, comments that drove a temporary plunge in the handful of publicly-traded quantum computing stocks, though they have since largely recovered.
The quantum sector has come a long way since breaking out in the early part of this decade, when a flurry of small start-up funding announcements and proof-of-concept projects that seemed to signal a revolution in the making. Funding activity quieted down, particularly in the US, after 2021, but it could be on the rise again. QuEra’s announcement represents one of the largest funding rounds ever for a US-based quantum firm, with Honeywell-backed Quantinuum and Alphabet spin-off SandboxAQ as the only other quantum companies with rounds of $300 million or more, with both of those rounds announced during 2024.
More important than funding, Boger believes the sector has turned a corner and entered a more stable phase.
He told FE, “The industry went from being a mile wide and an inch deep to where we are today, which I'd say an inch wide and a mile deep,” meaning the sector is becoming more concentrated, and is moving on from small proof-of-concept projects to longer, deeper engagements with real revenue involved. For QuEra, examples of this include the Nvidia-connected deployment in Japan, a project with Los Alamos National Laboratory announced last November, and more work that Boger said QuEra will discuss in the coming months.
Boger added QuEra was not affected by Huang’s comments, especially since it remains a private company without concerns about turbulent stock patterns.
He joked, “I was speaking with my Nvidia friends a couple of weeks after the Jensen comments, and I said, ‘Hey, are you looking for a job?’ I mean, why would a company like Nvidia invest in quantum if it's still 20 years away? And then, of course, Jensen invited our CEO to be on-stage with him at the GTC conference next month. So, maybe what Jensen meant is that in 20 years quantum will be bigger than Nvidia.”