A new firm, formed out of Oxford University last year, aims to manage qubits inside quantum computers using machine learning. Oxford professor Andrew Briggs, tech entrepreneur Vishal Chatrath, the company’s chief scientist Natalia Ares, and head of quantum technologies Dominic Lennon co-founded the company, which today announced that it has raised a £1.4 million (or about $1.9 million) seed funding round led by Nielsen Ventures and Hoxton Ventures. The financing was also supported by Voima Ventures, Remus Capital, Dr. Hermann Hauser, and Laurent Caraffa.
The company’s technology is technology agnostic, meaning it may be used with any conventional quantum computing technology.
The idea is that, rather than going through a lengthy manual tuning procedure, QuantrolOx’s system will be able to tune, stabilise, and optimise qubits much more quickly. QuantrolOx CEO Chatrath claims that current methods aren’t scalable, especially as these machines advance.
I was speaking with a single American investor. “We’re like the picks and shovels of the quantum sector,” Chatrath said, “in that we don’t have to wait for revenues for a quantum computer to be useful.” “As you progress from five qubits to — hopefully — millions of qubits, you’ll require our software on a daily basis to perform device characterization and qubit tuning.”
However, for the time being, the company is concentrating on solid-state qubits. That’s partly because they are systems to which the corporation has access, including through a tight collaboration with a Finnish lab that the company wasn’t ready to reveal. QuantrolOx, like many machine learning challenges, requires a large amount of data to create successful machine learning models.
We’re still in the early phases of quantum computing, as Chatrath also pointed out, but if tools like QuantrolOx can help researchers speed up the process of testing their devices, it’ll be a boon to the entire industry. Many companies in the industry have already approached the company to use its control software, he said.
The company now employs seven full-time employees and expects to add another ten in the near future. However, as Chatrath pointed out, he does not expect that figure to rise significantly in the next two years. “We don’t need a large team because we’re concentrating on our area,” he explained. “We don’t want to go all-in on full-stack.” We don’t want to go any higher in the stack, and we can’t go any lower due to hardware constraints. As a result, we’re really concentrated. “
QuantrolOx is now focusing on forming more agreements with quantum computer manufacturers. These are long-term relationships since the team requires not just physical access to the equipment, but also access to the source code that controls them.
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