QuEra Computing Quantum Funding Milestone early 2025

Google-Backed QuEra Raises $230 Million👀

Good Morning,

In recent years, QuEra who came out of stealth in November, 2021 have done some of the top research in Quantum computing in the world.

QuEra Computing has established itself as a leading player in the quantum computing industry by focusing on neutral-atom quantum technologies.

This is a huge funding for a very promising Startup. A startup out of Boston called QuEra said on Tuesday that it has closed financing of $230 million from the likes of Google and SoftBank.

I consider QuEra a logical qubit leader and pioneer:

To be able to raise $230 million in a signal round is nearly unheard of in the Quantum startup community.

The company will use the money to power its next stage of growth by building a “useful” fully quantum computer in the next three to five years. So roughly the 2025 to 2028 or 2030 period.

• The investment includes new backers such as Google, SoftBank Vision Fund, and Valor Equity Partners, alongside continued support from existing investors.

Google being involved here is a major sign of the times, with BigTech taking an increasing stake in the most promising Quantum startups.

QuEra Computing, is among the leader in neutral-atom quantum computing. QuEra is an MIT spin-off that we have talked about before. Curiously, Sixty million dollars of the $230 million is contingent on the company satisfying a prerequisite funding condition, which is currently in progress, QuEra said in a Tuesday (Feb. 11).

With this funding, QuEra will:

1. Accelerate the development of fault-tolerant quantum computer technology.

2. Rapidly expand its team of world-class scientists and engineers, with a focus on technical and scientific talent.

3. Strengthening build and test capacity to scale up and meet growing demand for high-performance neutral-atom computers.

4. Broaden its portfolio of application co-design, cloud, and on-premises engagements with global research organizations, Fortune 500 companies, and government programs.

It’s a substantial sum of money and it suggests that QuEra, which launched back in 2018, is making good progress on its goals.

Very oddly, this is more like an announcement. That is and notably, the financing is not equity. It’s a convertible note that QuEra’s team says will be converted into equity when the company next raises an equity round. Think of it as a booster.

QuEra is one of the U.S. East coast startups most plugged into Academia and the top Colleges in Quantum. That is, the financing appears to validate the considerable technical breakthroughs achieved by QuEra in collaboration with Misha Lukin, Markus Greiner, and their teams at Harvard, as well as Vladan Vuletic and his team at MIT. This as Boston as it gets!

An Epic Collab of Academia and Industry - MIT & Harvard

This is also wildly more funding with Google and Softbank coming in as big players and possibly, collaborators. Think about it, to date , QuEra has raised just under $50 million, including a $17 million round in 2021. This team is still early stage, but their papers have become super important. It’s not a round, it’s literally financing.

QuEra’s progress makes many bullish in the industry for what is possible sooner, rather than later. I’d estimate this is one of the top Quantum startups in all of the United States that has recently come to prominence.

A report from Quantum Insider in September, 2024 projected or forecasts that quantum computing will contribute $1 trillion in value creation by 2035. It’s rather speculative but sounds about right for a ten year horizon, although it could also be a lot higher.

There has actually been a lot of validation for the real world they are doing. QuEra has been involved in several high-profile projects, including partnerships under DARPA’s IMPAQT contracts, which focus on advancing quantum algorithms for neutral-atom quantum computers.

QuEra Computing has made significant strides in the realm of logical qubits, representing an essential aspect of fault-tolerant quantum computing. Their research here is bleeding edge with papers few can even understand.

Six months ago they announced Andy Ory as their interim CEO. QuEra had released a roadmap detailing its plans to scale quantum computing capabilities, targeting a quantum computer with 100 logical qubits and 10,000 physical qubits by 2026. With this financing, I think it’s a good signal they might be on track.

Mikhail Lukin is the original founder of QuEra. Original investors included Rakuten, Day One Ventures and Frontiers Capital. Angel investors Serguei Beloussov and Paul Maritz also joined in the round back in 2021. In four short years, QuEra has certainly come a long ways.

The company is not providing a valuation, but Yuval Boger, QuEra’s COO, said it represented “a very substantial increase” compared to QuEra’s previous round. Last I checked he was their CMO, so how did he become their COO? Very peculiar. 😄

A financing round like this would have been unthinkable even a few years ago, but if Google is involved, this means BigTech is starting to get a lot more serious about Quantum in the later half of the 2020s.

QuEra adds it also has plans to “broaden its portfolio of application co-design, cloud and on-premises engagements” as well as strengthen its build and test capacity to “scale up and meet growing demand for high-performance neutral-atom computers”.

The Rubidium Atom Quantum Leader

Atoms consist of a nucleus and their electron cloud. At QuEra, we use Rubidium atoms. When the positive and negative charges of an atom balance each other, the atom is said to be neutral, just like most atoms are found in nature. By shining a laser at the atom, we can increase the energy of the atom, and excite it. Each atom has a wide range of potential excited states, each at different energy levels. This offers a great platform for storing and processing quantum information. Any choice of two such levels can be named ‘0’ and ‘1’ to form a qubit.”

Properties of Rubidium Atoms

Rubidium (Rb) is a soft, silvery-white metallic element belonging to the alkali metal group. It has the atomic number 37 and exhibits several properties that make it suitable for use in quantum computing:

1. Atomic Structure: Rubidium has a single electron in its outer shell, allowing it to easily engage in interactions that are critical for manipulating quantum states.

2. Laser Cooling: Rubidium atoms can be efficiently cooled using lasers, reaching temperatures close to absolute zero. This cooling reduces thermal noise, which is essential for maintaining the coherence of quantum bits (qubits).

3. Well-Understood Atomic Transitions: The atomic transitions in rubidium are well-characterized, enabling precise control and manipulation of its quantum states using laser light.

4. Versatile Qubits: Rubidium atoms can serve as excellent qubits due to their long coherence times, which allow for stable quantum state representation over extended periods. This is critical for the execution of quantum algorithms and error correction methods.

This in 2025 might be among the most viable approaches to QEC and qubits for legit Quantum computers to actually be a reality one day, likely in the 20 years.

While QuEra’s website and marketing are fairly basic, what you have to pay attention to with this startup is the strength of their R&D and Papers.

Neutral Atom Quantum Computers:

Rubidium is used to create arrays of atoms that can be manipulated as qubits, leading to scalable quantum computing architectures. Recent prototypes have demonstrated how rubidium-based systems can efficiently perform quantum operation.

🌌 Logical Qubit Breakthrough

I need to emphasize this point.

QuEra's recent papers and achievements related to logical qubits also include significant breakthroughs in error rates. Notably, their study showcased the largest number of logical qubits tested to date—48 logical qubits operating with improvements to traditional error rates. This study, published in Nature, validates the concept of logical qubits contributing to coherent quantum operations in a scalable manner. QuEra demonstrated an error rate of 0.5% with these logical qubits, which is considerably better than previous benchmarks, such as the Google Quantum AI Lab's 2.9% using three logical qubits. This positions QuEra along with top institutions actively addressing the challenges associated with large-scale quantum computing

Google must have noticed their higher performance. In 2024, this was all hard not to notice if you follow Quantum computing at all. Leave it to the scientists with their atoms and lasers. When they’ve been at it long enough, we’ll have real QC computers.

It appears to me that the United States is the leader in Neural Atom computing. If you think of Infleqtion, Atom Computing, and QuEra it’s already a very strong contingency. I’m a little less bullish on Pasqal, PlanQC and others. What it comes down to here is the U.S. advantage to access to bigger funding and access to talent.

The architecture of neutral-atom quantum computers often involves techniques such as optical trapping and Rydberg state excitation. Optical dipole traps are employed to create potential wells in which neutral atoms can be confined and manipulated. If you are technical you can understand it better for sure.

QuEra could be the “OpenAI of Quantum”

For whatever reasons, DARPA also seems especially keen on neural atom computing. Quantum innovation in the 2020s could also result in significant hybrid computing innovations around AQ, how Generative AI and Quantum software might interact with the arrival of new potential architectures for certain kinds of computing. Combine this with neuromorphic computing and you get some interesting potential results in the future. All of this will require an incredible amount of inter-disciplinary expertise. Teams at Microsoft, SandboxAQ and others are moving in that direction.

If AQ is in its infancy, Quantum computing QEC is also in its nascent stage. Without substantial error correction we can’t manifest quantum computers with millions of qubits. Today’s machines can’t be considered real quantum computers. The tech is functionally not very useful as it is today. So a lot of the PR is just nonsense where it sounds more like lobbying than science.

QuEra is one of the few startups with the potential to actually change this reality.

You need multiple labs like Infleqution, Atom Computing and QuEra to work on similar things to see real progress in a good timeframe. So for the neural atom computing approach, we finally have that at least. The company has already launched a quantum computer called Aquila, which runs on a field-programmable qubit array processor with 256 rubidium atoms acting as the individual qubits. It’s an okay foundation.

Quantum computing today in 2025, is a bit like where Generative AI was in 2016. So we can expect a decade of rapid progress I’d think, considering the amount of National Defense spending that will also go into Quantum in general because it’s so important for things like space-tech, materials, biotechnology, healthcare, finance and economic innovation with multiple emerging benefits to global economies.

If you had asked me to pick one QC startup six months ago to be like an OpenAI of Quantum, I would have said Quantinuum, QuEra or PsiQuantum. But now I’d lean towards someone like QuEra. PQ has had $1.3 billion in total funding and Quantinuum will spin out as an IPO. In China, you have to watch Origin.

Origin is recognized as a leading player in the quantum computing sector in China. They are known for developing innovative superconducting quantum computers and have constructed systems with impressive qubit counts, such as their third-generation system, Wukong, which has the capability to perform complex quantum computing tasks efficiently.

Race to be the Quantum OpenAI’s?

• Quantinuum

• QuEra

• PsiQuantum

• Origin

A few other good QC startups. It also depends on which qubit approach you think wins. It also depends on what big players like Nvidia, Microsoft, Google and Amazon do. So it’s slowly becoming a more interesting emerging technology industry to watch, and that’s mostly why I do it and/or bother.