A number of companies, betting on various architectural approaches, are trying to build the first commercially viable quantum computer capable of significantly outperforming current systems.
Visualwhich entered the race earlier this year with the goal of developing the first utility-scale quantum computer by the end of the decade, said this week it had raised $300 million. The massive Series A round was co-led by ARCH Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Bezos Expeditions, Index Ventures, General Catalyst, Lowercarbon Capital, Bain Capital and others.
Founded by Caltech physicists, Oratomic uses lasers, which act as optical tweezers, to hold individual atoms in place as the basis for its quantum computer.
The startup was launched after its researchers discovered that their approach can correct errors using significantly fewer qubits – the basic unit in quantum computing – than previously thought. Since quantum computers are sensitive to noise, effective error correction is key to turning them into truly useful tools.
“You couldn’t previously convince any of us to start a quantum computing company, because we just thought it was too far away,” Oratomic co-founder and CEO Dolev Bluvstein told TechCrunch. “It wasn’t until we made this recent discovery that we all changed our minds at the same time.”
While most other quantum companies make prototypes available to researchers and companies, Oratomic has no plans to develop or sell these systems, known as noisy intermediate-scale quantum, or NISQ.
Bluvstein noted that Oratomic should not be compared to PsiQuantum, a startup valued at 7 billion dollars last September, which also bypasses the NISQ stage and aims to deliver a viable million-qubit quantum computer by the end of next year.
Oratomic’s approach is fundamentally simpler and less expensive, Bluvstein argued. “The difference is that we need about 10,000 to 20,000 qubits to make a useful computer, and we’ve already shown experimentally all the basic elements required by that computer on a slightly smaller scale,” he said.
A full-scale quantum computer could facilitate breakthroughs in any field that requires complex calculations, from biotechnology, chemistry and logistics to artificial intelligence and cryptography.
Companies working to build these machines and develop the software to use them have seen a surge of enthusiasm from investors recently. Several startups in the space, including Infleqtion and Quantinuum, went public this year. Meanwhile, existing public companies like Rigetti and IonQ have seen their stock prices rise over the past 18 months.
But investor Vinod Khosla is so confident that Oratomic will build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer that wrote to X it was his company’s “largest initial investment.”
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