Quantinuum, a quantum technology firm created in 2021 when Honeywell spun off its quantum computing hardware business and merged it with a U.K.-based software firm, is ramping up its finances with a fresh $300 million equity investment.
The fundraising round was led by JPMorgan Chase, with additional participation from Mitsui & Co., Amgen, and Honeywell, which has been and remains Quantinuum’s majority owner.
What the new investors all have in common aside from this investment is that all three had pre-existing relationships with Quantinuum. JPMorgan, for example, has used Quantinuum quantum computing hardware run constrained optimization experiments with implications for the financial sector, while Quantinuum and Amgen have worked on computational biology, and Quantinuum and Mitsui partnered to bring quantum solutions to Japan and other Asia-Pacific markets.
The new investment puts Quaninuum’s pre-money valuation at $5 billion, and brings the total capital raised by Quantinuum since inception to approximately $625 million. “Nearly $300 million” of that capital was injected into the company by Honeywell in late 2021 when Quantinuum was officially born from the business combination of Honeywell Quantum Solutions and Cambridge Quantum Computing. This is Quantinuum’s first equity funding round since that merger.
Quantinuum said the new funds will be used to accelerate the path towards building universal fault-tolerant quantum computers, while also extending Quantinuum's software offering to enhance commercial applicability. Fault-tolerance so far has been the weakness of most quantum computers, but Quantinuum and others, including IBM, Amazon, and Google, as well as institutions like Harvard University, have achieved major milestones of the last year in the field of error correction for quantum computing, all of which is seen as accelerating the timeline for building more fault-tolerant machines.
Lori Beer, Global Chief Information Officer at JPMorgan Chase said of the firm’s bet on quantum computing, "Financial services has been identified as one of the first industries that will benefit from quantum technologies. As such, we have been investing in quantum research and our team of experts – led by Dr. Marco Pistoia – have made groundbreaking discoveries, partnering with quantum computing leaders like Quantinuum. We look forward to continuing to work together to positively impact our businesses, customers and the industry at large."
Quantinuum CEO Rajeeb Hazra added, "The confidence in our business demonstrated through this investment by our longstanding strategic partners and industry leaders is a clear indication of the value we will continue to create with the world's highest performing quantum computers, groundbreaking middleware to accelerate the developer ecosystem and innovative application software to revolutionize fields like cryptography, computational chemistry, and AI."