Q-CTRL digest

Q-CTRL’s 2024 year in review

December 12, 2024
Written by
Michael J. Biercuk

Things that were, things that are, and some things that have not yet come to pass

As we close out another extraordinary year, we’re energized by the momentum we’ve built and the transformative impact we will continue to deliver in 2025.

Looking back on the past year, I’m humbled by how much we’ve accomplished. I tell people frequently that as an executive running a fast-growing business in a brand new sector my short-term outlook is determined largely by the worst problem I have to help the team solve on any given day. It’s only when we take a step back and connect the dots of our successes over the full year - small and large - that the full image of how Q-CTRL is reshaping the sector comes into relief.

As always, let’s start with the TLDR.

Resetting expectations for the quantum industry (again)

At a time when some were fearing the threat of a “quantum winter” we reset expectations for investor sentiment once again. This year we expanded our already record-setting Series B, bringing our industry-leading funding round to USD $113M overall - the largest Series B among quantum software companies (and arguably the largest overall in the sector). We are grateful to the investors participating in this round, especially our lead investor, GP Bullhound.

Our focused view that infrastructure software can be the key enabler of quantum hardware across all applications has become a key driver of new capabilities in the field and underpins our commercial partnerships with leading quantum platform vendors. This new investment, coupled with our growing portfolio of technical demonstrations in quantum computing and quantum sensing, has positioned us for ubiquity and permanence in the industry.

Accelerating the path to useful quantum error correction

Quantum computers suffer from an Achilles’ heel that is simply not present in conventional computers: error-prone hardware. This enormous gap has led to huge research investment and attention.

Quantum error correction (QEC) is an algorithm designed to identify and fix errors in quantum computers. QEC is real and has seen many exciting research demonstrations this year which make it clear it's a viable approach in the long term.

However, there’s one major problem: right now QEC does not, in general, make quantum computers perform better. In most cases, it makes quantum computers worse in the experiments published to date, or it consumes so many resources that given today’s small quantum computers, the costs outweigh the rewards.

This doesn’t sit well with us - our mission is to make quantum computing useful. As a product-focused company, we’re doing everything we can to deliver technology that actually helps. This year we’ve invested heavily in understanding which parts of QEC should remain “internal” research projects within the quantum sector, and which should be rolled out to quantum computing end users as soon as possible.

Building on those insights we recently demonstrated for the first time that using “QEC primitives” (bits and pieces of QEC without full and resource-intensive logical encoding) made a quantum processor more powerful! And we know it worked because we set a new world record for the largest “maximally entangled” state at 75 qubits. That kind of state is fortuitously a resource needed to run full QEC - so our results are part of a virtuous cycle!

Meanwhile, our hardware partners leveraged our commercial software products to demonstrate incredible advancements in the state-of-the-art in QEC research. Nord Quantique showed how using our tools for quantum computing design, automation, and scaling enabled them to get beyond breakeven with their autonomous error correction techniques. And The University of Sydney made huge strides in a new form of bosonic QEC leveraging numerically optimized control operations to generate and manipulate these complex codes efficiently.

The development of QEC will be a continuous process - no one yet knows which codes will work best at scale, or what ongoing research in the field may enable. We’ll see amazing new scientific demonstrations that advance this essential technology, running in parallel with increasing quantum-computer scales. The pace of scientific advances is incredible and accelerating.

Getting real benefits from QEC as an end-user is another matter entirely. As we always say, QEC is just another form of feedback stabilization – even if it holds a foundational place in quantum computer science – and our focus must be on delivering increased capability. We’re committed to delivering easy access to the most powerful and most beneficial parts of QEC as rapidly as possible so you can do more. This year's work delivers on that mission, and we’ll continue to push in 2025.

If you’re seeking to plan for when and how QEC will impact you, earlier this year we prepared an accessible overview designed to give you meaningful and actionable insights.

Making quantum computing useful for everyone, together 

As a category-defining business in quantum infrastructure software, we help turn the exceptional hardware platforms built by our partners into the most useful computational tools possible. So we’re excited and proud of the progress we’ve made partnering with many of the best hardware vendors in the world to deliver even greater value to the community collaboratively.

This time last year we announced the world’s first native third-party software integration with any quantum computing platform when we launched our performance management software on IBM Quantum Services. This year we were very proud to take another major step in this partnership, introducing two powerful Qiskit Functions to the IBM Quantum Platform—our Performance Management and Optimization Solver functions—designed to help users maximize the potential of today’s quantum computers. These new Qiskit Functions also expand the availability of our technology to all IBM Premium customers. You can learn more about our exciting work with IBM through a joint presentation I gave at the Hudson Forum alongside our friends at Algorithmiq.

This year we were thrilled to expand our performance-management integrations into many more of the world's most advanced quantum computing platforms—Rigetti Quantum Cloud Services (QCS®), Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) Cloud QCaaS devices, and Diraq’s Silicon quantum processors. And at Q2B we announced Fire Opal upcoming support for IonQ backends, delivering our technology to commercial trapped-ion quantum computers! Fire Opal will also support integration with AWS Braket Pulse so you can also execute jobs via this platform.

We are also honored to bring our AI-powered software for fully automated calibration, tuneup, and hardware optimization from Boulder Opal to customers adopting on-premises quantum computing. We’re proud to be founding members of Rigetti’s Novera QPU Partner Program, and we are excited about our new partnership with QuantWare bringing automation to the tuneup and operation of their QPUs. Next year, customers will be able to access this technology shipped alongside their QPUs. Stay tuned for more details about this in the New Year! This technology has already been validated on real quantum computers to enable cold-start tuneup in <90 minutes!

Finally, we were very excited to join QuEra’s Quantum Alliance Partner Program, accelerating the development, deployment, and utilization of neutral-atom quantum computers to solve the world’s most challenging computational problems. Anyone can use Boulder Opal to design novel control solutions that enhance the performance of QuEra’s impressive machines.

Navigating the end of reliable GPS with quantum-assured PNT

GPS has become so ubiquitous in our daily lives that we hardly think about what happens when it isn’t available - or trusted. How do we navigate an era of GPS denial, jamming, and spoofing?

Analyses in the US and UK have both identified the temporary economic cost of an outage at approximately $1B per day. Commercial aviation has been looking for alternatives to GPS due to the technology's vulnerabilities and an increasing number of jamming incidents that disrupt normal flight operations and risk safety. Meanwhile, defense departments have identified alternative navigation solutions a top strategic priority.

We’re proud to be a leader in the application of quantum sensing to this critical challenge, delivering a new generation of quantum-assured navigation systems with key partners in the aerospace and defense sectors. At the heart of these new systems are our validated and in-house-developed software-ruggedized quantum sensors for acceleration, gravity, and magnetic fields that enable us to truly see the unseen.  

Our leadership in this critical application earned us recognition in the CB Insights “Game Changers” report for quantum navigation. This year also saw amazing progress in our technical demonstrations with key partners like Australian Defence, Airbus, and more. We’re looking forward to sharing more details of this groundbreaking work with you in the New Year.

For now, we can - with great excitement - remind you that we conducted some of the world’s first mobile field trials of quantum sensors in real environments, including ground and maritime tests of our new quantum magnetic and gravitational position-fixing technologies. One of our systems even made a special appearance at SXSW Sydney!

We’ve delivered real working systems 10x cheaper and over 4x faster than typical defense-technology development programs, all because of our exceptional team and unique view of how software is the key to delivering the power of quantum hardware. Stay tuned!

Transforming the quantum advantage outlook for quantum optimization

Quantum optimization is one of the most promising quantum computing applications with the potential to deliver major enhancements to critical problems in transport, logistics, machine learning, and financial fraud detection. McKinsey suggests that quantum applications in logistics alone are worth over $200-500B/y by 2035 – if the quantum sector can successfully solve them.

In a recent paper we announced incredible demonstrations of quantum optimization problems solved successfully on IBM gate-model quantum computing hardware. We were thrilled to see that our work spurred lots of interest and commentary in the community!

Our team’s groundbreaking results tackle complex problems using IBM quantum computers over 4x larger than the previous record and significantly outperform previous benchmarks on annealer and trapped-ion technologies. And importantly we didn’t just run the problems on a quantum computer, we solved them successfully - delivering the correct answer.

These results not only provide some of the most concrete evidence that real high-impact solutions to hard problems can be delivered via quantum optimization, they also reset the conventional wisdom of which machines would be best for this application. Suddenly, gate-model quantum computers took pole position in the race to quantum advantage in optimization.

There’s more work to do to definitively outperform the best classical alternatives, but as machines are getting larger and more powerful we’re seeing growing evidence that the threshold of quantum advantage is much closer than many have thought.  

You can learn more about the potential impact of this work via our case study with the Australian Army, and you can use this solution directly via Fire Opal!

Training the quantum workforce of the future

Our focus on workforce development stems from the urgent need to close the gap between the rapid advancements in quantum technology and the availability of skilled talent capable of leveraging these innovations.

This year, through a first-of-its-kind statewide rollout, our award-winning edtech platform for quantum computing, Black Opal, became a foundational learning module for engineering students within the Indian state of Tamil Nadu as part of its TNSDC's Naan Mudhalvan Upskilling Platform. We are proud to kickstart quantum education in the region and position India as a key contributor to the global quantum economy.

We also welcomed a new partnership with Dr. Al-Kuwari at HBKU CSE’s recently established Qatar Center for Quantum Computing to build Qatar's quantum technology workforce. By integrating our advanced tools into educational programs, students and researchers can access Black Opal’s interactive learning modules and Fire Opal’s error suppression capabilities to improve quantum algorithm performance.

We’re thrilled to have helped over 20,000 learners begin their quantum journeys so far, and we are looking forward to making quantum computing accessible to everyone in the New Year.

Winner winner chicken dinner!

It’s been a huge year for our team earning global recognition for the technology we’ve built and the way we’re shaping the quantum industry.

First and foremost, it was a great honor that Black Opal, our quantum workforce development education product was awarded the prestigious Edtech Breakthrough Digital Courseware of the Year award! Note that’s not the best quantum software or quantum education product - the best digital courseware across all sectors and industries! It’s a true testament to our team’s focus on delivering real value to our users and solving the biggest problems in quantum.

Our team is also so pleased to have been the recipient of multiple high-profile awards at the company and leadership levels —the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia Alliance Award for Quantum Technology, the Pearcey Foundation NSW Entrepreneur of the Year, the InnovationAus Paul Shetler Disrupter of the Year Award, and inclusion as one of The Australian’s Top 100 Innovators—in recognition of both the foundational research underpinning Q-CTRL, and the exceptional business we’ve built together. 

And in the most literal interpretation of “building the quantum future”, it was a huge thrill that our new Headquarters in Sydney was awarded a Master Builders Association award for best commercial fit out!

We’re always grateful for these kinds of recognition and are humbled to share the stage with many talented entrepreneurs, scientists, and businesses.

Realizing the quantum future, sooner

Reflecting on all that we achieved in 2024 fills us with pride and gratitude for the support that has helped us get there. We greatly appreciate our incredible team, partners, investors, and customers for their unwavering support.

As we look ahead, we remain steadfast in our mission to make quantum technology useful, both in enabling a totally new market and in defense of democracy.  

Thank you for being part of our journey, we hope you’ll join us in 2025 and beyond!

Happy Holidays to those who are celebrating.

All the best,

Michael J. Biercuk

CEO and Founder, Q-CTRL