Showing the geographical diversity of some of the Quantum companies around. The south coast of England see its very own Quantum Company raise $4.5m for its quantum computing effort to build large scale quantum computing.
Founded in sunny Brighton, one of the sunniest places in the United Kingdom there is a lab in which lurks a company with huge aspirations to build large scale quantum computers. This morning, the deal was announced that a number of VC’s: Hoxton Ventures, Village Global, Propagator VC, Luminous VC, and 7percent will invest in the enterprise to scale up their Ion trap quantum hardware.
“Hensinger and Weidt (founders) have developed a radical new approach to building a quantum computer. While some companies have created small quantum machines, Universal Quantum believes that only its technology has a realistic opportunity of being scaled up into machines large enough to unleash the huge potential of quantum computing.”
We have covered the company (a spin out from Sussex University) before and will continue to do so, as the new funding will Universal to develop new ion trap chips that utilise silicon. We have also seen their hiring efforts and expansion effort too.
About the Technology
Key to Universal Quantum’s appeal to investors are the fundamental differences in its approach to building a large-scale quantum computer compared to the rest of the players. Photonic quantum hardware requires billions of laser beams for calculations which operate at extremely cold temperatures marginally above absolute zero (-273C), which can prohibit scaling up to many quantum bits (qubits), and complex engineering to connect individual quantum computing modules through optical links.
Universal Quantum works a little differently, which has developed technology based on trapped ions as its qubits which employ to carry out cheaper microwave technology, without the need for a massive number of laser beams. Their cooling requirements are a lot less onerous being able to operate at temperatures (still pretty cold) of -200C, but hot by today’s quantum computing standards. In scaling up it has modularized its process to make machines that might be able to process millions of qubits.