Q-CTRL gets support of Sequoia

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sequoia Capital funded Google, Instagram and PayPal and is now backing an Australian quantum computing startup.

The Q-CTRL Scientists 

 The University of Sydney based Q-Ctrl was developed by Professor Michael Biercuk (paywall) to make quantum computers a reality. 

Q-CTRL was originally backed last year  by CSIRO’s Main Sequence Ventures last year alongside three other “deep tech” companies.

Most of the seed capital will be used to hire more scientists and software engineers to join the team. 

Q-Ctrl, which was founded in 2017, now has a staff of 16 young scientists, software engineers and machine-learning experts, but is looking to expand that number to 50 during the next two years.

Q-CTRL founder Michael Biercuk. Source: Supplied..

What is it 

Q-CTRL is part  of a global network of companies and organisations, which are given access to IBM’s quantum computing systems and collaborate together on building the technology together with tech a network of researchers and tech companies, such as JP Morgan, Samsung, and Oxford University.

Quantum computers are designed from tiny pieces of matter too small to be seen by the naked eye, and Biercuk and team will try to harness and control these quantum bits or "qubits”

Q-CTRL essentially improve the overall performance of the quantum algorithm” according to the founder. It does this by offering a cloud-based software solution designed to work with any quantum computer, which extracts more performance from quantum devices and combats decoherence.

Decoherence occurs where transferred quantum information gets lost or degraded when the quantum system is not perfectly isolated, leading to lost “quantum behaviour”.

Q-CTRLs technology is hardware agnostic and "can work with nearly every company working to bring quantum hardware to market". 

Why they Invested 

James Hardiman, a partner at DCVC in San Francisco, told The Australian Financial Review his fund backed Q-Ctrl because Professor Biercuk is "a force of nature" and the team of scientists and software developers he has assembled at Q-Ctrl is "as impressive as they come".

"Any time you have foreign cash inflows from organisations that are extremely competitive like Sequoia China or like DCVC or Horizons, that's an indication that we are doing something right," says founder Michael Biercuk

He said Q-Ctrl can itself become one of the word's biggest technology companies just by selling the control software – which will be turned into quantum computer "firmware" in later versions by embedding it into quantum computer controller chips – to all of the world's quantum computer makers.