UK QUANTUM COMPUTING STARTUP QUANTUM MOTION RAISES $50.5M

Quantum Motion, a quantum computing firm based in the United Kingdom, has secured £42 million ($50.5 million) in an equity financing round headed by Bosch Ventures (RBVC), with participation from Porsche, the Fund, the United Kingdom's National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), and other investors.

For the uninitiated, quantum computing is based on ideas drawn from quantum physics, with an emphasis on quantum bits (qubits) rather than atoms, and promises to expand what is possible with computers by executing complicated calculations in a fraction of the time. Accelerating the discovery of novel drugs and providing the capacity for the massive amounts of data processing needed by AI applications are two possible use cases.

According to Quantum Motion's CEO James Palles-Dimmock, speaking with Tecno, quantum computers will have a fundamentally different style of thinking than traditional computers. The quantum computer might tackle problems in minutes that would take a supercomputer hundreds of years to solve. The initial fields to feel the effects are those associated with materials research, such as energy materials, chemistry, such drug development or optimisation, and maybe even logistics and transportation.

Quantum Motion, founded in 2017 by University College London (UCL) and University of Oxford (Oxford) professors John Morton and Simon Benjamin, aims to develop scalable quantum computers by developing novel quantum computing architectures compatible with conventional silicon processing.

The qubits in a quantum computer are just as vulnerable to heat as the silicon chips in a regular computer, thus these machines need to be maintained in an extremely cold environment. When it comes to signal generation, routing, and processing, Quantum Motion claims it has built integrated circuits that can do so at deep cryogenic temperatures, just a few tenths of a degree above absolute zero.

Typically, the width of one of our silicon-based quantum chips is just a few millimetres, and the necessary cooling system is expected to be around the same size as a regular 19-inch server rack, according to Palles-Dimmock. Being in the heart of London allowed us to show that our method of quantum computing does not need massive CERN-like equipment or data centres the size of football fields.