Quantum News Nexus

Quantum computing companies suddenly are enjoying a funding boom not seen since the heady days of 2021, and Nvidia is right at the center of it.

Just in the last week or so:

• PsiQuantum announced a $1 billion Series E funding round that values the company at around $7 billion, with Nvidia’s NVentures unit among the participants. The funding was announced Sept. 10, but Nvidia’s interest in investing in PsiQuantum was widely reported last spring.
• QuEra Computing on Sept. 9 announced an expansion of its previously revealed $230 million funding round–yes, the one that already included Google–to include NVentures as an investor in the round. The Boston company also is working with Nvidia on a hybrid quantum-classical supercomputing deployment in Japan,
• Quantinuum majority owner Honeywell announced a $600 million equity raising and $10 billion pre-money equity valuation for Quantinuum, with NVentures and others joining an intriguingly varied list of existing investors. It is widely believed that Quantinuum could be heading toward an IPO by 2027, or maybe even as early as next year.
• Finland’s IQM Quantum Computers on Sept. 3 announced new funding of about $320 Million (€275 Million), led by Ten Eleven Ventures, which also became IQM’s first US-based investor. Nvidia is not involved in the round, but IQM is one of the many quantum companies Nvidia has collaborated with.
• There is even a SPAC deal to talk about: Infleqtion announced on Sept. 8 that it is going public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital Corp X, a move that comes just a few months after news of a $100 million Series C round. And, in keeping with our theme, though Nvidia was not named as an investor, Infleqtion also is an Nvidia collaborator.

All five of these companies are actively building quantum computers, and all are (or claim to be) full-stack quantum computing companies eyeing an array of market opportunities. Part of the reason the previous quantum funding cycle slowed was that investors came to grips with how much work still needed to be done to commercialize many quantum technologies. More than two years on, we are now seeing quantum companies growing revenue and becoming more known for their products and their business ventures than for their research papers and alignments with academic institutions.

Four of the five are headquartered in the US (or at least partially in the possible case of Quantinuum). Investment in US-based quantum startups really fell off after early 2022 and the cold spell worsened in 2023, though quantum firms in other countries drew a little more funding during that period. There were signs of a new quantum funding boom emerging last year, and now it appears to be here in full force.

What was hot during the quantum cold spell? AI. The community of AI startups arguably drew attention away from the quantum technology sector in recent years, but ironically, AI’s increasingly synergistic relationship with quantum computing is now playing a major role in reviving the quantum hype. In the coming months and years, quantum and AI will only continue to converge.

What also is ironic is that nine months after Nvidia acquired the reputation of having a bearish attitude toward quantum–although largely due to a very narrow parsing of much lengthier and more thoughtful comments made by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on the topic, (Start watching at about the 40-minute mark of this video)–Nvidia is now a bullish quantum investor.

Many of Huang’s supportive comments about quantum computing from that video were, at the time, overlooked. For example, here’s one: “Just about every quantum computing company in the world is working with us now.”

Ok, maybe not all of them, but a lot more than those mentioned above. Huang was emphasizing how much mutually-beneficial work Nvidia already had been doing with quantum computing companies. With quantum hype re-igniting and Nvidia leading the charge, there should be much more of that to come.