Quantum News Nexus

Recent news from around the sector…

Infleqtion just announced a $1 million quantum software contract with the US Navy, a deal that comes shortly after the Louisville, Colorado, company won a $2 million deal with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and about five months after the firm landed a US Army deal.

Government and defense contracts remain an important source of revenue for quantum companies–especially publicly-trade firms like Infleqtion (INFQ)–in a still-immature market. The Navy’s deal covers Infleqtion’s Quantum-Inspired Rapid Context (QuIRC) machine learning software platform for radio frequency (RF) signal processing, according to a press release. The DARPA deal was for software to support heterogeneous quantum systems, while the Army contract was aimed at sensing and navigation.

The Navy contract is a Phase II contract that follows Infleqition’s Phase I feasibility demonstration of how its software could be used for advanced RF signal processing capabilities that enhance situational awareness in complex RF environments, the release stated. An integrated prototype for testing and evaluation in operationally relevant Navy environments is now in the works.

“Modern RF environments are dense, dynamic, and increasingly difficult to interpret,” said Pranav Gokhale, Chief Technology Officer at Infleqtion. “Our contextual machine learning approach allows systems to understand signals within their operational context, dramatically reducing the data that needs to be stored or transmitted while preserving the information needed for rapid decision-making. This Phase II award allows us to advance QuIRC from feasibility to a deployable capability that can support mission-critical situational awareness.”

Infleqtion described QuIRC as a context-aware, self-learning data pre-processing platform designed to enable analysis and decision-making across high-throughput RF data streams. It is built on the firm’s patent-pending GPU-hosted Contextual Machine Learning (CML) technology, which enables machine learning models to capture contextual correlations across large RF datasets while significantly reducing computational and storage requirements.

Quantum Art announced that it has extended its Series A financing to $140 million. This update comes after the Israeli company late last year announced a $100 million round. The extended financing was led by Bedford Ridge Capital alongside new investors, Hudson Bay Capital, Poalim Equity, LIP Ventures, Wolverine Global Ventures, and IDA Ventures.

The new funding will be used to accelerate development of Perspective, Quantum Art’s 1,000-qubit multi-core system designed to enable commercial-scale quantum computing. The capital will also support development of advanced optical technologies required for massive qubit scaling, expansion of the company’s 2D architecture roadmap, and accelerate global business development.

IonQ has teamed up with Florida LambdaRail (FLR), Florida’s existing statewide research and education fiber optic network, to help FLR deliver on its vision for a quantum-safe network spanning Florida. Together with Florida Quantum and local colleges and universities, the groups’ first step will seek to create a nearly 100 mile quantum corridor from Palm Beach County to Miami-Dade connecting three research and education institutions, the companies stated. IonQ reports quarterly earnings next week.

In a pairing of quantum photonics and neutral-atom quantum computing technology, Monarch Quantum is partnering with Oratomic, with Monarch serving as Oratomic’s photonics systems integrator, and delivering its Quantum Light Engines photonic technology and supporting systems engineering, productization, and large-scale manufacturing. The joint work is aimed at accelerating Oratomic’s path to utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Haiku and finance giant HSBC have published a paper based on joint research that demonstrated “an efficient approach to encoding real-world probability distributions into quantum circuits,” according to a press release. You can dig into the details, but here’s Mykola Maksymenko, Co-founder and CTO of Haiqu, on what it means

“One of the biggest practical barriers is getting realistic financial data onto today’s quantum hardware. This work shows a scalable path around that barrier and helps move quantum finance workflows from theory toward execution.”

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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.