There are few companies founded today with their co-founder’s name. Prominent companies are Ford, Dyson, and HP; however, most start-ups use a name not associated with their founders. Rigetti, founded in 2013 by Chad Rigetti, would always be different. In 2017 MIT Technology Review named the company one of the fifty most innovative companies and appears to be one of the only companies that has emerged from the famous Y-combinator incubator, which birthed the likes of AirBnB.
Rigetti has recently made the news for achieving an $8M award from DARPA (the US military). In fact, Rigetti has gained a considerable amount of financial backing – reaching almost $200M in funding from its inception in 2013, which makes it one of the most well-supported Quantum Computing start-ups that is not part of a larger tech company such as Google, IBM or Honeywell for example.
Rigetti superconducting QC hardware powers many other services, and the number is always growing. To be specific, here is a list (Entropica, Horizon, OTI, ProteinQure, QCWare, 1QBit, Zapata, Riverlane, Strangeworks, Qulab, HQS, Quantastica, Qu&Co) of the partners. In terms of gaining access, Rigetti has collaborated with AWS (Amazon Web Services) to make access easy via Amazon cloud services if not using one of the other software platforms directly.
What do Rigetti do?
It is no secret that Rigetti is one of the pioneers of commercial Quantum Computing. If we look at the sheer number of Trademarks that originate from Rigetti, we can a number of products such as Aspen, Forest, Forest SDK, Pyquil, QCS, Quantum Advantage Prize, Quil-c, QVM. Again looking back at the founder and his time at IBM, we suspect that much of the company ethos is in creating a defendable moat and that means extensive product development and trademarking.
Rigetti creates hardware and have evolved its hardware through a number of iterations. Their most recent hardware has 28 Qubits named the Aspen-7. Previously their hardware sported as few at 8 Qubits back in 2017. The current Aspen-7 hardware sports at T1 lifetime and T2 lifetime of 41 and 35 microseconds respectively. Rigetti are taking the open approach of ensuring that the specifications for their hardware are transparent so that real progress is apparent for everyone to see.
The software toolkits have been perhaps popularised by Forest SDK. As you would expect, Rigetti has resources to ensure there is a community of users who can write quantum algorithms tailored for the Rigetti hardware. Perhaps not the widest known language, pyquil (python-based) enables programmers to interact with the framework and hardware. We (at QZ) have used many years ago the pyquil language and find it syntactically easy to use and quite intuitive. Of course, competing with the bigger companies such as IBM-backed Qiskit and Google-backed Cirq might be more challenging. However, other languages do support Rigetti hardware. There are other ways to interact – for example, if your existing code is in say Qiskit but you want to run on Rigetti hardware, there are other solutions for example where transpilers can come into play and allow front end code to be compiled into an intermediary and then down into low level quil (allowing to run on Rigetti).
At Rigetti Computing, our goal is to build the world’s most powerful computers to help solve humanity’s most important and pressing problems.
Rigetti Mission Statement
What does the future look like?
Clearly, the future is rolling out their hardware and ensuring that they are embedded into the fabric of the Quantum Computing Cloud, exposed by the likes of Amazon with AWS, for example. With so few hardware providers operating at this level, it sits between the smaller players and the really big boys. The challenge will be to compete, of course, and build a competitive advantage against the massive investments from Big Tech; however, by partnering with those more prominent players, it can gain willing users for its Quantum platform.
Chad Rigetti – Founder and CEO of Rigetti Computing
Chad Rigetti is a physicist and the founding CEO of Rigetti Computing. Formerly working in the IBM quantum computing group. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Regina and his Ph.D. in applied physics from Yale.
Previous Quantum Companies of the Day
- IBM: Quantum Company of the Day
- Google: Quantum Company of the Day
- QC-Ware: Quantum Company of the Day
- Zapata Quantum Company of the Day
- Multiverse Quantum Company of the Day
- StrangeWorks: Quantum Company of the Day
- Riverlane Quantum Company of the Day
- Xanadu Quantum Company of the Day
- Microsoft Quantum Computing Company of the Day
