Riverlane's Massive Series C

Cambridge, you may rise! ♞

Hey Everyone,

Riverlane is a very promising UK based Quantum startup. Their commitment to Quantum Error Correction (QEC), really sets them apart.

The round was led by Planet First Partners with participation ETF Partners and EDBI Pte Ltd and existing investors Cambridge Innovation Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners, the National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF) and Altair. It’s a Series C and amounts to $75 million, a sizeable amount in the current Quantum winter.

I find this team fairly likeable and I’m overall very bullish on UK Quantum startups.

As quantum computers continue to scale, quantum error correction (QEC) will be a critical enabler to unlock the industry's next wave of progress.

Recently I heard that Honeywell is considering spinning-out Quantinuum, which really excites me. Honeywell is reportedly considering an IPO for its quantum computing subsidiary Quantinuum, potentially as early as next year with a valuation of around $10 Billion. You might recall Honeywell has an approximate 54 percent ownership stake of Quantinuum.

We need more of these Quantum startups to go IPO to give some credibility to the industry and see how they actually perform. I don’t know where Sandbox AQ or Infleqtion are at but I’m hoping they can IPO soon as well.

As things stand today, Quantum computing remains fairly fringe, and a lot of the marketing efforts of these companies exist in an ecobubble of their peers.

However this significant Series D is huge for the credibility of Riverlane. Quantum computing may still largely be in the theoretical domain, but the money that it’s attracting is very real to the extent that the potential positive outcomes of the space are significant for science, engineering, R&D, materials research and unexpected benefits to the future of AI.

Existing investors Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), Amadeus Capital Partners, the UK’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), and global leader in computational intelligence Altair also participated in the Series C round.  

The Mission

• Riverlane’s Deltaflow™ technology aims to enhance quantum computing capabilities across industries, enabling applications in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, material science, and transportation.

Riverlane unveiled their roadmap this past July here.

A Bright Future in Quantum?

Demand for quantum error correction technology has grown dramatically over the past year. Driven by a series of technical breakthroughs, improvements in qubit quality and a global shift towards building error-corrected quantum systems, the quantum computing industry is now looking beyond today’s small, error-prone machines to a new generation of ‘fault-tolerant’ quantum computers with integrated QEC technology.

• Deltaflow (a QEC stack) comprises proprietary QEC chips, hardware and software technologies working in unison to correct billions of errors per second.

• The startup is building technology that fits on chips used in quantum computing systems and can track, predict and fix the errors generated by quantum bits (known as qubits). 

The PR quote I find most interesting was this one:

“Even five years ago, I would have said that only one of these qubit types is going to work,” said Steve Brierley, Riverlane’s founder and CEO, in an interview in his Cambridge office. “But actually, what we’ve seen is they’ve all progressed [along a] Moore’s law rate. It seems to me that the pieces are in place to get to the first generation of error-corrected quantum computers. And this will be really significant because it will be the first time that a quantum computer goes beyond the capability of any supercomputer.”

What I like about watching the QC space is the variety of startups in different regions of the world all focusing on something a bit different, whether it be their qubit approach or how they try to scale the space towards a more exciting and tangible future.

Let’s go a bit deeper: