Quantum Related Startups

 Short extract from Nature on Quantum startups, lots more at the link.

Quantum gold rush: the private funding pouring into quantum start-ups

A Nature analysis explores the investors betting on quantum technology.

Elizabeth Gibney

Robert Schoelkopf, at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, with a refrigerating device that cools superconducting qubits to just above absolute zero.Credit: Roger Kisby/Redux/eyevine

Robert Schoelkopf spent more than 15 years studying the building blocks of quantum computers until, in 2015, he decided it was time to start constructing one. The physicist and his colleagues at Yale University began pitching their start-up firm Quantum Circuits, Inc. to investors, hoping to persuade venture capitalists that the time was ripe to pour cash into a quantum-computing company. Within two years, the team had secured US$18 million. That was enough to build a specialist laboratory — which opened this January — in a science park near the university in New Haven, Connecticut, and to employ around 20 scientists and engineers.

For Schoelkopf, venture capital (VC) investing was unfamiliar territory. But he’s not the only quantum physicist to make a successful sales pitch. Governments and large technology firms have long nurtured quantum research, and in the past few years have announced billions of dollars for the field. As their support has ramped up, outside investors have looked to get in early on a fledgling industry.

By the start of this year, according to an analysis by Nature, private investors had funded at least 52 quantum-technology companies globally since 2012 — many of them spin-outs from university departments. (Academics have founded many more start-ups that have yet to close deals.) Although the value of some of the cash infusions remains secret, Nature’s analysis captures the scale of recent activity. It finds that, in 2017 and 2018, companies received at least $450 million in private funding — more than four times the $104 million disclosed over the previous two years (see ‘Cash for qubits’). VC makes up the bulk of this cash. Many firms in the VC hub of California’s Silicon Valley have already plunged in, and among the rest, “most are keeping a close eye on quantum”, says Christopher Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park who co-founded the quantum-computing firm IonQ in 2015.  .... '