Moving faster towards the quantum future

We’re excited to wrap up another incredible year and plan with eager anticipation what’s to come in the next. Our steady growth has led to a massive acceleration of progress, and some truly industry-shaping outcomes that will reverberate globally in 2024.

Whenever I have the opportunity to write quarterly or annual summaries, I surprise myself with how much we’ve accomplished. Too often we’re consumed by the worst thing we have to take care of on any given day, and we lose sight of the steady pace of outcomes that we collectively bring to reality. String together enough such successes and suddenly the world looks very different.

With the opportunity to reflect on the year that’s drawing to a close, it’s with great joy and gratitude that we can share how our team is delivering in every direction - from new strategic partnerships, product releases, and commercial outcomes, to meaningful engagement with allied governments around the world. We hope you enjoy this brief recap, and that it fills you with the same excitement we feel every day.

There’s a lot to say below, so we’ve put the TLDR into a graphic for you.

Pushing the industry ahead through transformational partnerships

Q-CTRL’s mission is to make quantum technology useful, and our focus on quantum infrastructure software has made us a category-defining business in the sector. The success we’ve had in our published technical demonstrations of massively boosted quantum-computer performance has formed the foundation for an extraordinary string of new partnership announcements in 2023.

From longstanding relationships to new friends, powering the quantum future is a collective effort and we’re honored to work with the best.

In November, we announced our commercial partnership with IBM Quantum to deliver the world’s first natively embedded performance-management software for quantum computing. This represents the first time an independent software vendor has integrated their technology into any major quantum computing platform.

This points to quantum computing operating with high performance at a scale where you can begin to solve the problems at scales that matter - from logistics optimization and finance through to physics simulation. We’re live right now on 127 qubit machines with more to come!

We also forged new strategic alliances with Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) and Diraq, expanding our platform partner network and amplifying our global impact. Stay tuned for many more announcements in this direction next year.

Raising Q-CTRL’s profile as a global quantum industry leader

Q-CTRL has always been a global company. We’ve structured our operations this way and serve customers around the world. But this year saw us raise our profile into a new echelon of global leadership for the quantum industry. It was the privilege of a lifetime to represent Q-CTRL at the Australian State Visit to Washington DC, meeting President Biden, Prime Minister Albanese, and Ambassador Rudd. There is truly no spectacle like a South Lawn ceremony at the White House! (This was my second White House visit in just a month).

We were equally visible and connected to government leadership in Australia, getting the chance to showcase our technology at Australian Parliament House and even getting a shout-out in Parliament from MP Aaron Violi.

These high-profile engagements came on the back of the announcement in July that Q-CTRL was selected as a key vendor in the AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) technology-sharing agreement, delivering quantum-assured solutions for defense among the allied nations. Our central role, based on our unique software-defined quantum sensing capabilities, was even featured in The New York Times, delivering a truly new level of prominence in the global quantum industry. 

I was also honored to have been invited to attend the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore, and to speak at the UBS Disruptive Technology CEO Summit in Hong Kong, building key relationships in APAC. But I wasn't the only one on the move.

As we strengthen partnerships with the Quad, our Chief Strategy Officer, Aravind Ratnam, joined Austrade on a mission to India after previously meeting Indian PM Modi in DC. This trip was built on the announcement that, in partnership with the Quad Investor Network (QUIN), we would deliver world-class quantum technology training to build diverse quantum workforces - starting in Australia and the US. Together we are delivering access to our industry-leading quantum education software, Black Opal, to students pursuing education in Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutions in Australia and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the United States.

Our Chief Scientist, Michael Hush, represented the company at the World Economic Forum, and the UK Quantum Technology Showcase, among others. And our broader team participated in the UK DSEI and Quantum Technology Showcases, the European Quantum Technology Conference, and a dozen other global events in Boston, Washington, Tokyo, Singapore, Berlin, Madrid, and more.

This is supported by our team’s global expansion. This year we expanded our presence in Europe by opening new offices in London and Berlin, solidifying our commitment to building a collaborative global quantum community.

We say that our technology goes everywhere that quantum goes, and so do we!

Making the impossible possible for our customers

We strive to make quantum technology useful. But we don’t just do it for ourselves - we do it to deliver commercial and strategic advantages to our customers and partners by enabling them to achieve things that were previously impossible.

Quantum computing

The unbelievable performance enhancements we’ve delivered to users of IBM Quantum hardware, captured through algorithmic benchmarks and multiple new world records for performance, have already unlocked incredible capabilities for our users. For instance, now you can directly run full hybrid 80-qubit QAOA - and get the right answer.

Building on our performance management technology for IBM, Bluequbit was able to transform what was possible in experimental demonstrations of their hierarchical quantum learning models using our software. Meanwhile Capgemini and GSK were able to gain new insights into pharmaceutical drug discovery on quantum computers, and even demonstrate that our tools outperform alternative error mitigation strategies - with no overhead. That can result in a 100X+ cost saving and superior performance!

And the same is true in the exciting area of Quantum Error Correction (QEC). QEC has been top of mind throughout the year and roared into the discussion again at Q2B Silicon Valley with some exceptional new results from the community.

Turning QEC from an exciting novelty into a practically useful tool will still require a lot of work. We’ve always advocated that QEC is just another form of quantum control, and that a combination of quantum error suppression and quantum error correction provides the best chance to drive forward advancements in quantum fault tolerance. This year our customers and partners proved us right!

We were happy to host Nord Quantique in a joint webinar where they showcased how our professional-grade “EDA” product Boulder Opal enabled their exceptional new results in QEC, including a demonstration of extended logical-qubit lifetime! Here our tools were used to stabilize and optimize hardware before the execution of the QEC encoding step.

We also saw incredible outcomes from the University of Sydney pushing the limits in bosonic QEC with deterministic and optimized state prep. Both of these demonstrations show not only how our product helped accelerate and expand research, but also how instrumental quantum error suppression deployed is for the realization of practical and useful QEC. We are proud to have played a role in supporting these exceptional research initiatives.

Quantum sensing

And in quantum sensing we’re thrilled to have recently shown a real path to quantum-assured navigation on moving platforms with Australian Defence, leveraging our unique approach to software ruggedization. In our work recently published in Nature Communications, we demonstrated experimentally how software-level innovation (supported by Boulder Opal) could improve the tolerance of real sensor hardware to vibrations by more than 20x! This technology is key to enabling long-endurance navigation in real mission environments.

Driving product innovation to serve our customers better

The turn of the New Year is the perfect time to set new goals; quantum computing offers amazing opportunities for students, professionals, and organizations to get involved. We are committed to supporting the development of a skilled quantum workforce, so in January we added new support in our industry-leading quantum education platform for mobile.

We also introduced Black Opal for Educators, a breakthrough offering that enables course developers and skills and training providers to supercharge their curriculum with world-class interactivity and visualizations. It was thrilling to see this continued innovation pay off as the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre announced that Black Opal had been selected as the default workforce training platform for quantum computing across the UK.

In December 2022 we launched Fire Opal, our algorithmic enhancement product. And since then we’ve delivered an array of exciting new capabilities that enable you to find illumination from quantum algorithms with autonomous hardware-optimized execution. These include the new fully configured single-command QAOA Solver, convenience features like asynchronous jobs retrieval so you can forget about the quantum hardware queues, and major excitement with support for 127-qubit hardware backends!

As we move down the quantum stack, we were proud to make our flagship research tool in quantum control, Boulder Opal, available for free to the academic research community. Boulder Opal is the first and industry-leading design-and-test EDA for the quantum sector and we’re thrilled to see so much adoption.

We also released a major new AI-driven toolkit for hardware automation; with this tool you can tune up a superconducting quantum computer from nothing to maximum performance in <90 minutes with no human intervention. And for those who are building medium-to-large scale quantum computers we introduced Boulder Opal Scale Up - everything you need to scale up your system from 1 to 100 useful qubits, including product access, customization, and direct support from our expert team.

Finally, to demonstrate our commitment to protecting not only our technology, but our customers’ information, I’m very proud that Q-CTRL achieved a significant milestone by becoming the first independent quantum software vendor to achieve ISO 27001 certification. Conformity with this international standard means that we’ve created a robust system to manage risks related to the security of data that we own or handle.

Building an impactful and scalable business

We kicked off 2023 by announcing our expanded Series B, bringing in marquee investors like Salesforce Ventures, Morpheus Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and even global rugby legend John Eales. This investment grew our record-setting funding round to $54 million USD, the world’s largest Series B for any quantum software company! This has enabled all of our strategic, technical, and product-driven priorities, and we’re grateful to all of our existing and new investors.

As a testament to our growth and success, our team blossomed to over 100 employees at the half-year mark - and we’ve continued to grow across our four global offices. Still, we’ve never really had a home - expanding steadily even during a globally challenging period in 2020 and the years that followed when office-use collapsed and thereafter when hybrid work made flexible serviced offices better for our needs. Fortunately we both grew and the public health situation improved - so we were proud to break ground on a new global headquarters in Sydney with support from the NSW Government.

The new HQ - in a fully refurbished 1930s engineering building - will be the first standalone commercial quantum technology facility in the country, and is indicative of Australia’s status as a global leader in the industry. We’ve recently achieved practical completion in construction so look out for excitement around the opening next year.

But of course businesses aren’t about offices or equity investments. So we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved through the year. We’ve grown our revenue an average of 2.6X YoY since 2020, and we’ve even achieved quarterly cash-flow-positivity in the first half of the year showing not only strong revenue, but also exceptional capital efficiency. This was facilitated both by expansion of existing relationships and the addition of many new customers in 2023.

We’ve also won a range of major multi-year multi-million-dollar public sector contracts with Australian Defence, and the UK, NSW, and Canadian governments. This sets us up well for our continued growth as our currently contracted bookings for 2024 are already ~50% larger than our total revenue last year!

Our software user base has now exceeded 13,000 across our products (excluding users of our natively integrated performance-management software on IBM Quantum services). As we strive to make quantum technology useful, we’re proud that our infrastructure software directly supports such a large fraction of quantum computing hardware companies and end-users globally, and we look forward to deepening our commercial relationships in the New Year.

Earning acclaim for our products, team, and technology

We’re very grateful that our team's hard work and impact did not go unnoticed all around the world. This year we were honored to accept multiple awards.

In May, Black Opal for Enterprise emerged as a SIIA CODiE Award finalist. Knowing the history and great technology that has been recognized by the Software & Information Industry Association, we are proud to have been a finalist of this prestigious global award. Then in October we accepted the Quantum Effects Award for Fire Opal in the Best Quantum Computing Software category. This award recognizes innovations that bridge the classical and quantum worlds across various industries, enabling new services and opening up new perspectives.

In August, Q-CTRL was named by Gartner as a 2023 Cool Vendor in Quantum Computing for our work pioneering quantum control infrastructure software. Soon after, we also accepted the 2023 Startup Daily Best in Tech award for Most Innovative Startup in recognition of our contribution to the Australian startup scene.  

Finally, I’m humbled to have received a number of major personal recognitions this year. I was grateful to receive the NSW Premier's Prize for Science & Engineering in the Leadership in Innovation category, and to have been named among the Top 100 innovators by The Australian for the third year in a row. I was also pleased to serve as a featured speaker at the inaugural SXSW Sydney, appear on ABC’s Q&A, and help the world understand superconductivity on Bloomberg TV (turns out I was right about LK99!).

Looking ahead toward the quantum future

We are so thankful for our team, partners, investors, and customers who have shown us continual support. As we look back on how much we’ve accomplished in 2023, we express our gratitude for the year that was and excitement for the things to come.

There is much trepidation around the world about what is to come in 2024 economically, geopolitically, and technologically. To invoke my favorite quote from Marie Curie, nothing in life is to be feared, only understood. Now is the time that we should understand more, so that we may fear less.

Q-CTRL is committed to helping the world understand the power and potential of quantum technology to deliver better outcomes for all. Thank you all for your support and engagement on our journey.

Happy Holidays to those who are celebrating.

All the best,

Michael J. Biercuk
CEO and Founder, Q-CTRL