Depending on whom you ask, quantum computing is either on the verge of commercial viability or still a speculative business, the value of which has yet to be fully proven. But a recent flurry of financing moves suggest the sector is drawing more interest from institutional investors and loading its coffers to weather whatever the future holds.
And, unlike the modest fundraising rounds that got quantum start-ups off the ground in the last five to 10 years, the recent deals are much bigger. For example, Quantum Machines (QM), a Tel Aviv start-up that has been working in the trenches of quantum computing control electronics since 2018, recently announced it raised $170 million in Series C funding from a list of investors that included Intel Capital, the venture funding operation that is in the process of being spun off from Intel. QM’s Series C take brought the company's total funding to date to $280 million.
That round would have been the biggest of the still-young year for a quantum company if Boston-based QuEra Computing had not in January announced a $230 million funding round led by Google and the SoftBank Vision Fund.
Officially, QM’s round was led by PSG Equity with participation from Intel Capital, Red Dot Capital Partners, and existing investors. QM’s field of expertise–control electronics for quantum computers–helps quantum computer manufacturers support hybrid quantum-classical computing and produce stable qubits. Control electronics play a role in error correction, which is widely seen as the key to making quantum computing more practical and commercially viable, and has been at the center of recent quantum advancements touted by AWS and Microsoft, among others.
"The role of control electronics is central in operating quantum computers and laboratories,” said Dr. Itamar Sivan, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Machines, in an email exchange with Fierce Electronics. “It also plays a very significant role in error correction - these aspects complement rather than contradict each other. Our system is a crucial component of the error correction stack. Major vendors significantly rely on vendors like Quantum Machines to build large-scale quantum computers, and this is the trend we're seeing in the market now, an increasing reliance on Quantum Machines.”
While companies large and small throughout the quantum computing sector are contributing to error correction in various ways, QM in its funding announcement claimed that “more than 50% of companies in the space now use our technologies."
One of those is Nvidia. QM collaborated with Nvidia on the DGX Quantum system, which stirs in QM’s control technologies with Nvidia’s Grace Hopper GPUs and CUDA-Q quantum-classical platform to enable accelerated computing with real-time quantum control, which further shortens the timeline from breakthrough to practical quantum computers, QM said.
QM isn’t the only quantum computing firm reeling in funding recently. IonQ, one of a handful of publicly-traded quantum computing companies, just announced it acquired a “controlling stake” in ID Quantique (IDQ), a Geneva, Switzerland, company that, at 24 years old, is an elder statesman of the quantum community.
The deal’s financial terms were not disclosed, but Bloomberg had earlier reported that the two companies were in talks over a deal worth about $250 million. IDQ focuses on post-quantum cybersecurity and quantum networking, the latter having been at the center of two previous IonQ acquisitions–Qubitekk and Entangled Networks. The IDQ deal also comes after IonQ Executive Chairman Peter Chapman, in his previous role as president and CEO of the company, often talked of the importance of quantum networks in enabling quantum computers to be tied together to scale up their computing power.
In addition to these moves, Horizon Quantum, a quantum computing firm founded in Singapore in 2018, recently announced that it plans to merge with dMY Squared Technology Group, with the resulting company to be publicly traded. The deal is similar to the “blank check” special purpose acquisition company mergers that IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum used in order to go public and raise millions of dollars in new funding. In fact, IonQ went public a few years ago after merging with dMY Squared Technology III.