- Horizon Quantum Computing announced it raised $18.1 million in Series A funding
Horizon Quantum Computing, a Singapore-based company building software development tools to unlock the potential of quantum computing hardware, announced today that it raised $18.1 million Series A investment from Sequoia Capital India, Tencent, SGInnovate, Pappas Capital, and Expeditions Fund.
The funding round will boost the company’s growth, allowing it to strengthen its science and engineering teams to accelerate product development, establish its new engineering center in Europe and bring Horizon’s unique technology to the market. Horizon Quantum Computing’s total funding now stands at approximately $21.3 million.
Sequoia Capital India and SGInnovate – which led Horizon’s Seed+ and Seed rounds respectively – have both reconfirmed support of the company’s ambition to provide tools to make programming of quantum computers as accessible and efficient as it is for conventional computers today.
Quantum computing is currently facing two main challenges to widespread adoption: the development of hardware capable of supporting quantum computation at scale and the creation of software tools that enable programmers to harness this hardware to solve real-world problems. And Horizon Quantum Computing is focused on the second challenge, which is enabling domain experts to leverage quantum computing in their most demanding computational workloads. Horizon is building a system for quantum software development that enables developers to bridge the gap between classical code and quantum accelerated applications.
Horizon has reached key milestones in its technology development, demonstrating advanced compilation techniques, algorithm synthesis, and rapid device characterization. And at the Q2B conference in Silicon Valley in December 2022, Horizon demoed its integrated development environment and announced it would be launching an early access program this year.
Horizon also joined Singapore’s National Quantum-Safe Network and has recently seen the first data transmission from its node last year. And Horizon’s participation in this network is a step towards fulfilling the company’s ambition of enabling secure and privacy-preserving access to cloud-based quantum computers
Horizon Quantum Computing also recently announced that it is opening its first European offices in Ireland where it is building out its new engineering center. And the company is currently recruiting a software engineering team in Dublin to boost worldwide operations.
The company was founded in 2018 by Dr. Joe Fitzsimons, an expert in the space of quantum computing applications. And Dr. Fitzsimons has more than 18 years of experience in quantum computing and computational complexity theory and holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford on quantum computing architectures. Plus the leadership team also includes Dr Si-Hui Tan, Chief Science Officer, who holds a Ph.D. in Physics from MIT and has been actively involved in quantum research for 18 years.
KEY QUOTES:
“Quantum computing has the potential to completely change how we think about computing. While getting to large scale quantum computing is a daunting challenge, it is undeniable that progress towards that goal is being made. At Horizon, we focus on unlocking the power of future quantum computers, and have made significant headway towards our goal of enabling conventional software developers to take advantage of the technology through abstraction and automated algorithm synthesis. The new investment will support our effort to break through the barriers to useful quantum computation.”
— Horizon’s CEO Dr. Joe Fitzsimons
“We have been bullish on the developer economy thesis for a long time. At the same time, we believe that a tectonic shift will be driven by advancements in quantum hardware. But unlocking quantum computing for the millions of developers is no small feat. Wouldn’t it be amazing if any developer could develop quantum algorithms with little to no prior quantum experience? This is the future that Horizon is enabling. We believe in Joe’s product vision around abstracting the underlying quantum physics to enable developers to create quantum software with ease, and we have been hugely impressed by the technological breakthroughs that the team has achieved in a short period of time.”
— Pieter Kemps, Partner, Surge at Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia
