Quantum News Nexus

Haiqu, a quantum software start-up whose research was recently affirmed by IBM and banking giant BMO Montreal, has raised an $11 million seed round led by Primary Venture Partners, with participation from several other parties, including Qudit Investments, a venture capital firm led by John Donovan, the former CEO of AT&T.

Other names on the list of participating investors include Alumni Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Silicon Roundabout Ventures, Angel One Fund, and returning investors Toyota Ventures and Mac Venture Capital. For Alumni Ventures, Haiku represents just the latest in a long line of quantum investments that also includes early backing of Rigetti Computing and Xanadu, the former a publicly-traded company and the latter of which is on track for an IPO. Toyota Ventures first backed Haiqu in its $4 million pre-seed funding round in 2023.

New York City-based Haiqu was co-founded in 2022 by Richard Givhan, a Stanford-trained engineer who has worked at Mitsubishi Electric, and Mykola Maksymenko, a former quantum researcher at Max Planck Society and Weizmann Institute. The start-up spent formative time in the University of Toronto Creative Destruction Lab for early-stage science firms, a program that also counts established quantum companies like Multiverse Computing, Xanadu, and SBQuantum among its alumni.

The $11 million round for Haiqu follows several other quantum funding announcements over the last month and a half, and while it is not is hefty an amount as was pulled in by Horizon Quantum Computing or Photonic, it looks to be a difference maker for Haiku. The firm said in a press release that the new funding will be used to accelerate the launch of its operating system for quantum applications, which it described as “a hardware-aware quantum software stack for running near-term applications at 100x less computational cost than existing solutions.” The company added that its software “significantly advances middleware through circuit optimization and error shielding, algorithmic subroutines like data-loading, and software orchestration to run more complex applications with significantly fewer resources.”

Haiqu also said it will use the funding to expand its team, a group that includes recent hire Antonio Mei, former Principal Technical PM from Microsoft Quantum, who is now Lead Product Manager at Haiqu and steering the OS launch. 

Givhan further explained Haiqu’s aim in a statement: “Quantum teams need to make empirical progress on hardware to close the gap toward industrially useful quantum applications. Today, too little experimentation happens because quantum cloud costs are prohibitive and hardware performance remains insufficient. Our goal is to change that overnight with a software system that can run larger applications at a fraction of the cost. We are grateful to have found investors who recognize the ugly truth: middleware isn’t sexy, but it matters.”

That last part is a fun little sound bite. Technologists love to debate the ongoing value of middleware in a world where a lot of the abstraction capability it provides can now be done in the cloud, but in quantum computing, middleware is still very important, especially in scenarios where quantum computers and classical computers need to work together.

As for the IBM and BMO Montreal mentions at the top of this post, both companies’ endorsements of Haiqu’s work were included in a November blog post from Haiqu on the topic of using quantum embeddings to support anomaly detection.

Haiqu is now allowing researchers to sign up to become beta users of its OS.

Image: Haiqu co-founders (left to right) Mykola Maksymenko and Richard Givhan.

Quantum News Nexus is a site from freelance writer and editor Dan O’Shea that covers quantum computing, quantum sensing, quantum networking, quantum-safe security, and more. You can find him on X@QuantumNewsGuy and doshea14@gmail.com.