Pasqal, a Paris-based quantum computing startup, announced today that it has raised $100 million in a Series B round approved by Singapore’s Temasek. In addition to Temasek, through existing investors Quantonation, Defense Innovation Fund, Daphni, Eni Next, and new investors European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, Wa’ed Ventures, and his Bpifrance (Large Venture Fund). ) also participated in this round. .
Founded in early 2019, Pasqal stands out in an increasingly crowded field of quantum computing startups because the company is betting on quantum computing of neutral atoms. This is a relatively new and potentially game-changing approach to building quantum processors. Instead of trapped ions (such as IonQ) or superconducting quantum computers (such as IBM), neutral atom quantum processors use lasers to essentially hold atoms in place with optical tweezers.
As you can imagine, building a technique to keep only one atom in this trap created its own set of challenges, which are now mostly solved. The advantage here is that if you can do this on hundreds of atoms at a time, you’ll have a very dense qubit matrix and reshuffling in 3D space as needed for your particular algorithm using holographic techniques. It is possible to create both matrices that can be And all this happens at room temperature. This makes these machines more like Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) than traditional quantum processors. You can read more about Pascal’s paper on this process here. It is also worth noting that Alan Aspect, who won the Nobel Prize in 2022 for his work on quantum entanglement, is one of Pascal’s co-founders.
Image credit: Pascal
As Pasqal co-founder and CEO Georges-Olivier Reymond told me, the company has already demonstrated that it can control more than 300 atoms at once. “He puts only one atom in the laser beam and it’s very difficult to monitor and control it,” he explained. “But once you’ve achieved that, you can scale it almost easily, creating arrays of arbitrary shape.” However, this flexibility and ability to pack these atoms into very dense arrays of just a few microns between qubits provides the technology. advantage.
With some of these basic capabilities now in place, Reymond says the team is working on building a quantum control system and can start implementing quantum algorithms. There are also startups focused on building quantum control hardware, but none optimized for neutral atoms, so the company decided to build its own system.
Clearly, the Pasqal team is very optimistic about its system, and Reymond believes the team will be able to demonstrate the “benefits of quantum business” to potential customers in 2024.
At this time, most researchers believe there is no industry trend toward a single technology to solve all algorithms. Instead, different quantum technologies will find sweet spots for solving different problems. For Pasqal, the team believes the system works particularly well for graph-centric problems. “There are many computational problems that can be reconstructed in graph form,” he explained. “What we can do with atoms is represent the shape of this graph, and embed the complexity of algorithms into this geometry. Ultimately, instead of using thousands of quantum gates, we can just implement a few of them, Algorithms can run and are resilient to errors.”
The company is currently working with Crédit Agricole CIB, BASF, BMW, Siemens, Airbus, Johnson & Johnson, Thales and others to help them understand where their technology can solve their business needs.
Quantonation Managing Partner Christophe Jurczak said: “Quantonation has supported the company since its spin-off from the Institut d’Optique. truly shows.”
