Recently Honeywell announced that it was buying the majority share of CQC – Cambridge Quantum Computing in a deal worth hundreds of millions. But what are the wider implications for the industry? Could we see more mergers and consolidations? Will QC companies look to specialise or vertically integrate into a quest for market dominance? Here we outline what the future might be for the nascent industry with some thoughts from our Quantum Market Analyst.
Category: Quantum Companies
Agnostiq Inc. the one-of-a-kind quantum computing Saas startup has been very busy lately. They have secured 2$ million in seed funding to support the development of their Saas software platform. Their financial growth is led by Differential Ventures and other companies like Scout Ventures, and Boost VC. Agnostiq previously has also raised $830 thousand in pre-Seed funding, with the majority of the funds came from its current investors Boost VC and Differential Ventures.
Spurred on by the hiring of one of Google DeepMind’s key players, could the Quantum Company from Cambridge be the next contender as a DeepMind of Quantum? DeepMind is a start-up that emerged in the UK to pioneer Deep Leaning and AI, and as the world shifts into exploring how quantum computing can be explored in machine learning, there could be another company named CQC that could be the contender for perhaps the UK’s hottest Quantum / Deep Tech start-up.
There is a reason we are choosing IonQ right now. That is that financial interest in the SPAC area and IonQ plans to enter the stock market via this route, according to reports. The technology that IonQ builds is in the name: Ion Trap. That is at its core it uses Ion Traps for qubits.
As we now head into spring, we have restarted our reviews of companies of the day. Today we look at ApexQubit, which is aiming at changing the pharmaceutical and drug discovery process using classical and quantum computing. Drug discovery pipelines take up to around ten years and can cost billions of dollars. Computational approaches are combinatorially expensive and therefore techniques that can reduce the affective sampling space could be advantageous.
The University of Sussex has announced that it will join the quantum race. It will make Universal Quantum it’s latest spin-out company, giving them a solid foothold in the industry. The tech company is led by quantum computing experts and native scientists Prof. Winfried Hensinger and Dr. Sebastian Weidt. Building the world’s first large-scale quantum computer is the goal in Universal Quantum’s sights.
M Squared recently announced that it has received £32.5 million from backers to support its growth and to develop new technologies.
Zapata Computing Inc. today announced that it has raised $38 million in Series B funding, up to a total of $64 million. This round was led by Comcast Ventures, Pintango, and Prelude Ventures. Other Series A investors were also involved. These include BASP Venture Capital, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, and The Engine Accelerator Fund. New investors that joined for the first time are Ahren Innovation Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, Honeywell Venture Capital, ITOCHU Corporation, and Merck Global Health Innovation Fund. The investors all have faith in Zapata’s promise to bolster efforts to commercialize quantum computing. Zapata also shows how much it has progressed since last year’s Series A funding.
IQM has managed to raise a total of €71 million after it recently raised €39 million in Series A funding. This will allow the superconducting quantum computer manufacturer to become a leader in European quantum computing. Within a year, this round of fundraising is the highest among all European deep-tech startups.
DISCOVERY, the largest industry-led quantum computing project in the UK, was announced by nine major organisations. It is a £10 million programme to address commercial quantum computing and what makes it unfeasible now. UK Quantum Technologies Challenge, led by UK Research and Innovation, is partially funding the programme.
