The University of Cambridge spin-out plans to use the funding to accelerate its quantum entanglement roadmap, expand its teams and fuel its global growth.
Nu Quantum, a UK-based quantum network start-up, has raised $60m in Series A funding to accelerate its mission to reach fault tolerance – a significant step to realising the full potential of quantum computers.
The University of Cambridge spin-out hopes to achieve its goal by interconnecting quantum processors into a more powerful distributed quantum computer.
The former Start-up of the Week, founded by Dr Carmen Palacios-Berraquero in 2018, connects these processors by creating high-quality quantum entanglement between them, which is when a group of particles remain connected and operate in tandem, even when they’re separated over a vast distance.
Nu Quantum believes that its quantum networking infrastructure – the Entanglement Fabric – will help unlock and underpin the mass commercialisation of quantum computing via distributed architectures in quantum data centres.
“When we launched seven years ago, very few were thinking about networked or distributed quantum computing as a strategy for scaling, but we saw it as one of the most urgent and challenging outstanding problems in the industry, and set out to solve it,” said Palacios-Berraquero, commenting on yesterday’s (10 December) funding announcement.
“This investment validates our vision and the maturity of our solution as the path to scaling. I’d like to warmly thank the Nu Quantum team for their achievements, and our investors for their support.”
The oversubscribed round, which Nu Quantum said was the biggest quantum Series A in the UK to date, was led by National Grid Partners and included participation from Gresham House Ventures and Morpheus Ventures.
The round also saw continued support from existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, IQ Capital, Ahren Capital, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, East Innovate, NSSIF and Sumitomo (Presidio Ventures).
The Series A funding will be used to accelerate Nu Quantum’s Entanglement Fabric roadmap, expand its multidisciplinary team and fuel its global growth, according to the start-up.
Palacios-Berraquero told Bloomberg that the funding will also be used to build a testbed that demonstrates Nu Quantum’s ability to link quantum processing units. She also said that Nu Quantum will work to secure partnerships with companies developing quantum computers and processing units, starting with firms building from trapped ions.
“As quantum computing continues to rapidly evolve, we see huge potential for enabling technologies that can address the challenges of scaling and fidelity,” said Maya Ward, investment director at Gresham House Ventures. “Nu Quantum offers a compelling path to solving these critical industry pain points and unlocking practical, large-scale quantum advantage.”
Last year, Palacios-Berraquero spoke to SiliconRepublic.com about the origins of Nu Quantum and how the start-up wants to help the quantum industry mature.
“We want to scale quantum computing to achieve fault tolerance and usefulness more quickly than can be achieved monolithically,” explained Palacios-Berraquero at the time.
“But we also want to help the industry mature, so it can scale in an interoperable, horizontal way, rather than just vertically, similar to the scaling of classical computing.”
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