Quantum News Nexus

Chicago-based quantum memory and networking start-up memQ announced that it has raised $10 million in Series A funding, led by Quantonation and Ocean Azul Partners, with syndicate participation from new and existing investors.

I first heard about memQ in early 2022 at an industry event during a casual lunch conversation with a fellow Chicagoan who I was talking to about the fast rise of quantum start-ups in the Chicago area. The firm had been spun out from the University of Chicago the year prior, and was focused on quantum memory for the storage of quantum states for use in quantum networking applications. Much of the early work was done in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory. At that time, most people exploring quantum technology were still trying to wrap their heads around some of the fundamentals of quantum computing, and were not yet really investigating quantum networking.

Anyway, by 2023, memQ would land a $2 million seed funding round led by pioneering quantum investor Quantonation.

“Quantonation was the industry’s first venture fund dedicated to quantum technologies and deep physics, recognizing the potential for quantum systems to transform our use of information,” stated Christophe Jurczak, founding partner at Quantonation, as part of the latest funding announcement.“We see in memQ the potential to unlock and accelerate the power of quantum across our entire portfolio, as well as the industry at large – and to be a clear industry leader in that process.”

From the memQ press release:

“The memQ xQNA portfolio provides the core components needed to network quantum systems together for modular growth, unlimited scale, and real-world use cases such as scale-out configurations, cooperative processing, and blind cloud quantum computing – all using dense and efficient chip-scale technology.  The company’s quantum network interface controllers (QNICs) allow various types of quantum computers to join a network without collapsing the quantum state; the quantum memory modules (QMMs) provide stable quantum memories for centralized entanglement operations; the quantum control system (QCS) orchestrates qubit and entanglement operations across a distributed network with atomic precision; and the distributed quantum compiler (xDQC) distributes workloads across the network based upon optimum resource allocation for maximum performance.”

“memQ’s breakthrough technology addresses a key issue facing today’s quantum computers: the inability to work together over classical networks; this blocks them from leveraging the type of modular scale-out configurations that are key to today’s HPC and supercomputer systems,” added Charles Foley, Chairman and CEO of memQ. “Our end-to-end architecture provides qubit-agnostic connectivity and control of connected quantum systems over standard optical telecom links, using chip-scale solutions that are efficient, powerful, and straightforward to integrate.”

Key partners of memQ include Nvidia and Atom Computing. In fact, the funding announcement came two weeks after memQ, during Nvidia’s GTC event, unveiled the roadmap for its Extensible Distributed Quantum Compiler built on Nvidia’s CUDA-Q platform.

As for Atom Computing, CEO and Founder Dr. Ben Bloom stated in memQ’s funding release, “Photonic integrated control circuits are a key enabler of the utility-scale, networked quantum systems we’re building at Atom Computing. memQ is making meaningful progress on technologies that could be central to scaling quantum computers, and we look forward to collaborating with their team to accelerate that vision.”

The quantum networking space is a bit more crowded now than it was back in 2022, and activity is heating up. Atom Computing, for example, recently announced a quantum networking collaboration with Cisco Systems, and Cisco, which also partnered with IBM, generally seems very determined to put its stamp on quantum networking the way it has over the decades with other networking technologies. Meanwhile, players like IonQ, Qunnect, EPB Quantum, and more, continue to advance this part of the sector.

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.