Quantum Circuits Inc. Quietly Raises $26.5 Million

Insider Brief

• Quantum Circuits Inc. raised a $26.5 million extended Series B.
• The round was backed by Sequoia Capital Partners, one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, among others.
• Additional funds will likely be used to expand the Quantum Circuits team and provide additional space in New Haven.

Quantum Circuits Inc. raised a $26.5 million extended Series B from some of the world’s biggest venture capital groups, a Connecticut area business media is reporting. The funding round reportedly happened earlier in May — without a lot of the typical fanfare that accompanies a raise of this significant size.

The company, which is building quantum computing systems based on superconducting technology, quietly received backing from one of the top Silicon Valley firms, Sequoia Capital Partners, among others, according to the Hartford Business Journal reports. Quantum Circuits has raised $84 million since its 2015 inception,  according to the journal.

The additional funds are coming at a time when the company — and the industry — is transitioning from the engineering phase of building quantum computers to finding customers to trial the devices, Quantum Circuits, Inc. CEO tells the journal.

Smets said the company plans to offer its quantum computing capabilities in the cloud as a service this year. Smets, who joined the company in February, expects the company to sell the actual devices in the years to come. He believes quantum computers have the potential to be a transformative technology.

“Quantum computing is going to have a major impact on how we exist as a human race,” Smets told the Hartford Business Journal. “We’re going to solve problems that we’ve never been able to solve before. We might build new medicines, we might build new battery technology (for electric vehicles to go 1,000 times farther), we might solve cybersecurity problems that have just evaded us.”

Error Correction

Error correction is one of the fundamental challenges of quantum computing and is a particularly sticky problem for superconducting quantum approaches. In quantum computing, the qubits — which are the basic units of quantum information — are susceptible to minute environmental interference, or noise, that can skew a quantum device’s computational abilities.

While there are many companies exploring the superconducting approach to quantum computing, Quantum Circuits touts its proprietary approach to error correction. That error-correction approach is one of the reasons that Sequoia Capital is so interested in Quantum Circuits.

“Robust quantum error correction is one of the most critical hurdles facing the industry,” said Bill Coughran, Partner at Sequoia Capital, said in an earlier statement. “Quantum Circuits’ unique approach of intrinsic error handling at the qubit-level can dramatically simplify the path to commercial quantum applications.

Additional Funding Adds Growth Potential

Smets told the Hartford Business Journal that the additional funding will likely pave the way for growth — both in terms of head count and space size.

.The company expects to increase the number of employees by 50% by the end of 2024, Smets told the journal. They will also likely add more space in New Haven, home base of the company. Quantum Circuits, founded by Yale researchers and spun out of the university, currently has lab space is in Yale’s Science Park

“As the company and footprint in the industry grow, we’ll definitely be expanding our space in New Haven,” Smets said.

According to The Quantum Insider Intelligence Platform, Quantum Circuits was founded by three world-leading experts in quantum devices and information processing from the Department of Applied Physics at Yale University: Michel Devoret, Luigi Frunzio, and Robert Schoelkopf. Their group has produced many scientific firsts, including the development of a quantum bus for entangling qubits with wires and the first implementation of a quantum algorithms and error-correction with a solid-state device.

Quantum Circuits’ Yale roots are a good example of the potential for university-industry collaborations, Josh Geballe, senior associate provost for entrepreneurship and innovation at Yale University and managing director of Yale Ventures said, as reported by the Hartford Business Journal..

“This type of university collaboration with startups and industry is at the core of the QuantumCT initiative to continue to establish Connecticut as a leading hub for quantum innovation and impact,” Geballe said.