Germany’s Quint Raises 9.1 Million Euros to Develop Quantum Chips With Fewer Errors

Insider Brief

• German quantum computing startup Quint raised 9.1 million euros in its first funding round to develop chips designed to reduce errors and lower error-correction costs.
• Vsquared Ventures led the round, with participation from Quantonation, Nucleus Capital and industry specialists, including IQM co-founder Mikko Möttönen.
• Quint plans to use contract manufacturers for production and must demonstrate that its chip architecture retains its advantages at the scale of hundreds of qubits.
• Image: Quint Computing

German quantum computing startup Quint has raised 9.1 million euros in its first funding round to develop chips designed to reduce errors and lower the cost of building reliable quantum computers, Handelsblatt reported.

The financing, secured a little more than a year after the company’s founding, was led by Vsquared Ventures. Participants included Quantonation, Nucleus Capital and industry specialists such as IQM co-founder Mikko Möttönen, according to the newspaper.

Handelsblatt described the round as the largest raised by a German quantum computing company at such an early stage. Quint has also received a European Union funding award of more than 2 million euros, the newspaper reported.

The company is targeting one of quantum computing’s central engineering problems: Errors make calculations unreliable and require additional hardware to detect and correct them. Quint’s approach seeks to suppress a substantial share of those errors within the chip’s circuit elements.

“Error correction is the biggest cost driver in quantum computing today,” quantum physicist and investor Ion Hauer told Handelsblatt.

Reducing errors within a chip could reduce the resources needed to correct them, Hauer told the newspaper.

Reducing Errors Through Chip Design

Quint has developed a patented architecture for superconducting quantum chips, according to Handelsblatt. Superconducting circuits operate without electrical resistance and provide the basis for the company’s approach to processing quantum information.

Quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, whose states can combine the possibilities represented by zero and one. They use the rules of quantum mechanics to perform calculations, with potential applications that include simulations of chemical systems and optimization calculations for finance.

Protecting quantum information generally requires redundancy, spreading information across multiple physical qubits so that errors can be identified and corrected. That increases the number of qubits needed to perform reliable calculations.

Quint aims to reduce that burden by coordinating the design of its circuit elements with the electrical signals used to control them.

“We have developed an architecture in which the physical structure and wiring of the component work together with its electrical control,” co-founder Michael Hartmann told Handelsblatt.

Hartmann said that arrangement provides greater stability. Nucleus Capital investor Maximilian Schwarz told the newspaper that the architecture could shorten the path to fault-tolerant systems and make them less expensive. Such systems are designed to carry out reliable calculations despite errors in their underlying components.

Industrial Customers and Contract Manufacturing

Quint is a spinoff of Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Its founding team includes quantum physicists Hartmann and Christopher Eichler, along with economist Jona Stinner.

Hartmann previously spent years working for Google’s quantum team. He and Eichler spent years developing the chip architecture before establishing the company, according to Handelsblatt.

The founders deliberately chose Munich and Germany as the company’s base, citing proximity to potential industrial customers. Hartmann pointed to chemical producer BASF and pharmaceutical company Bayer as examples of companies in the market Quint hopes to serve.

Handelsblatt reported that experts expect chemistry and pharmaceuticals to be among the first sectors to gain substantial economic benefits from quantum technologies.

Quint plans to move quickly toward commercialization and make its technology compatible with a broad range of requirements, Eichler told the newspaper.

Over the medium term, the company intends to use contract manufacturers rather than handle all production itself. Handelsblatt compared that planned division of design and manufacturing to NVIDIA’s business model.

The transition to production will test whether Quint’s circuit design can retain its advantages as systems grow.

“A patent on a better circuit is not yet a chip that works in large quantities,” Hauer told Handelsblatt.

Quint must demonstrate that its advantage holds at the scale of hundreds of qubits, Hauer said. It also faces competitors such as Google and IBM, which have invested billions in quantum computing, he told the newspaper.

Hauer said a successful move from the laboratory to manufacturing could make Quint one of Europe’s most promising quantum investments.

The article was based on a computer translated version of the online story.