According to data from The Quantum Insider’s proprietary quantum market data platform, 2022 has seen 36 investment rounds made by venture capital (VC) firms in quantum computing startups. While in the whole of 2021, there were a total of 59 funding rounds. As you can see, this year looks like it’s going to be another record-breaker from an investment perspective.
To celebrate this, The Quantum Insider has come up with a list of the top five quantum computing startups that have most recently been funded.
1. evolutionQ
Fresh off its latest $5.5 million funding round this month that was led by Quantonation and The Group Ventures, evolutionQ plans to advance product development, expand service offerings and grow sales across Europe and North America, focussing on its flagship product BasejumpQDNTM.
Talking about the funding round, Dr. Norbert Lütkenhaus, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of evolutionQ, said:
“We are thrilled to see evolutionQ growing from its start in 2015, and now taking another big step with the international expansion of our technical team of security architects, software developers, and our sales team. It’s an exciting time as our growing team shapes the future of quantum-safe cybersecurity for global enterprises.”
The quantum-safe software company — founded by Lütkenhaus and evolutionQ’s President and CEO, Michele Mosca, back in 2015 — empowers quantum computing startups building a network based on Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) devices to easily deploy and cost-effectively manage quantum technologies throughout their network.
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2. Qubit Pharmaceuticals
Established in 2020 by the five-person founding team of Jay Ponder, Pengyu Ren, J.-P. Piquemal, Louis Largardère, and Matthieu Montes, Qubit Pharmaceuticals is a quantum computing startup that is developing a platform to accelerate drug discovery by way of ATLAS — built upon over 30 years of research — a software suite for the discovery and test of drug candidates running on supercomputers to co-design new drugs with pharma and biotech companies.
Whilst the startup is interested in developing quantum computing applications, it is already using high-performance computing.
Its latest funding, a €16.1-million ($16.9M) Seed Round finalized in early June and led by Quantonation, Omnes, XAnge, and Octave Klaba, will be used to enrich its portfolio of drug candidates, as the company has already launched three research programs on Covid-19, cancer and inflammation, and wants to launch ten, each representing an investment of $1.5 to $4 million over three years, according to Robert Marino, Qubit Pharmaceutical’s CEO in an interview with France Detail Zero.
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3. ORCA Computing
ORCA Computing’s latest funding, a $15-million Series A Round, was finalized on June 9th. This was in the same month this quantum computing startup announced it was partnering with the UK’s Ministry of Defence to develop a quantum computer to explore applications in defence. The investment was led by Octopus Ventures with participation from Verve Ventures, Quantonation, Oxford Science Enterprises, and Innovate UK.
The full-stack photonic quantum computing company — a London-based spinoff from the University of Oxford founded in 2019 by Ian Walmsley, Richard Murray, Josh Nunn, and Cristina Escoda — will use the money to help roll out the photonic quantum computing system and software to allow companies and organizations develop future data processing capabilities, according to ORCA’s CEO and Co-founder Richard Murray in an interview with Sifted.
ORCA Computing’s development of its modular quantum computing platform using photonic technology, able to store photons in its unique quantum memory that acts as a buffer, overcoming the core challenge of photonic quantum computing, will be greatly enhanced by the investment.
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4. Universal Quantum
British startup Universal Quantum is working on scalable trapped ion quantum computers and has developed technology based on trapped ions to carry out calculations using well-established microwave technology removing the need for a prohibitive number of laser beams.
Based out of Brighton on the UK’s south coast, this quantum startup was founded in 2018 by Winfried Hensinger and Sebastian Weidt, scientists from the University of Sussex.
To date, the Universal Quantum has raised just north of $5 million in venture funding, with approximately $500,000 of this coming via Quantum Exponential Group — a company focused on investing in quantum technology — and the advanced subscription agreement it made with the UK-based quantum startup. We understand this is in anticipation of a larger Series A round.
This goes along with the £7.5 million ($9.2M) Innovate UK’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund grant back in November 2021.
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5. Aegiq
Aegiq is another UK-based quantum computing startup founded in 2019 as a spin-out of the University of Sheffield by Maksym Sich, Andrii Iamshanov, Jon Heffernan, and Scott Dufferwiel. Its core technology is Identical Single-Photon Sources devices which emit a single photon after every trigger. Its processing techniques and designs allow it to achieve fast single-photon emission, which retains high similarity between successive photons. This is enabling technology for quantum optical applications: cryptographic communications, information processing, and imaging. More specifically the technology is key for quantum key distribution (QKD).
The startup has raised over $4 million in funding so far. Not counting the $1.8-million grant from Innovate UK in 2020, the Sheffield-based startup has raised twice already this year, once in January and the latest just last month, an oversubscribed round with investment from Black Quant and Quantum Exponential, as well as private angels.
Commenting on the round, Maxym Sich, CEO of Aegiq, said:
“We are delighted to have Black Quant and Quantum Exponential support our vision, where quantum data-driven applications will play a significant role in our everyday lives. This investment will help us accelerate the development of our unique portfolio of products for R&D customers, as well as drive our further product development in quantum photonics, quantum information processing and networking.”
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