The quantum funding news pipeline continues to produce, with the latest announcement coming from quantum software and algorithm design firm Classiq, which has raised $33 million in new funding from multiple investors, including Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, the venture capital program of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE); Phoenix, a $60-billion insurance company; Spike Ventures, a Stanford alumni investor group; and Samsung NEXT, the investment arm of wireless and consumer electronics giant Samsung.
The round also made room for individual investors Harvey Jones, who is the former chief executive of electronic design automation (EDA) firm Synopsys and a board member at Nvidia, and Lip-Bu Tan, who is the executive chairman of Cadence Design Systems, and has directed ans served on the boards of many companies in the semiconductors and EDA sectors.
The varied nature of the investors may go a long way toward suggesting how widely applicable Classiq’s Quantum Algorithm Design platform could be for quantum projects and applications across a variety of industries and use cases. As Classiq CMO Yuval Boger told Fierce Electronics via email, companies from segments such as cloud, insurance, banking, trading and finance, among others, “realize the potential of quantum computing in transforming risk analysis, portfolio management and many other aspects of their business.” Classiq now has a warchest of $48 million raised in the last 20 months from which it can draw to address these opportunities.
...In other quantum news this week, IonQ, which has earned many mentions in our frequent Quantum Updates, most recently said that its partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has generated a “sustainable and robust source of barium qubits” for IonQ’s next-generation quantum computers. This is good news for a company set to scale up its manufacturing of systems that leverage barium ions. IonQ also said the partners were able to shrink the barium source material down to a microscopic scale, which could help reduce the size of core system components, an important step in the creation of quantum computers small enough to be networked together…
…A lot of early quantum computing advancements have come directly out of universities, among them the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU Boulder.) That school’s CUbit Quantum Initiative this week welcomed three companies–Atom Computing, ColdQuanta, and Meadowlark Optics–and one industry group–SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics–to the CUbit Innovation Partners program. Notably, Atum Computing was founded by a CU Boulder alum, Ben Bloom, while ColdQuanta was founded by CU Boulder professor Dana Z. Anderson…
…Israel, taking a hint from countries like the U.S. and China that increasingly are viewing quantum computing as a strategic national defense technology (and a weapon in the hands of their enemies), is investing almost $62 million to create its own quantum computer. According to a Haaretz report, Israel is hoping to have a 20-qubit quantum computer within a year, and may work with companies outside of Israel to advance the project–though it should be noted that some of interesting quantum software innovations these days are coming from start-ups that began life in Israel…
…Rigetti Computing, in the process of merging with Supernova Acquisition Partners II in order to go public, made several announcements this week, including availability of its 80-qubit Aspen system, the development of a partnership with Nasdaq to pursue quantum finance applications, and a strategic partnership with Ampere to create cloud-native, hybrid classical-quantum computers.