Toronto’s Xanadu has raised a USD $100 million Series B financing round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and with participation from Capricorn, Tiger Global, BDC Capital, In-Q-Tel, along with returning investors Georgian, OMERS, and Tim Draper.
Xanadu was founded in 2016 to use particles of light for quantum computing to perform extremely fast and previously impossible computations at room temperature.
Over the last few years, Xanadu has consistently doubled its qubit count and made their quantum computers available over the Xanadu Cloud, which is the world’s first photonic quantum cloud platform.
They have also released two open-source software products: PennyLane, the hardware-agnostic and industry-leading standard for quantum machine learning; and Strawberry Fields, the only full-stack platform for photonic quantum computing.
This latest round of funding positions Xanadu to achieve its next major milestone: the building of a fault-tolerant quantum computing module.
“This fault-tolerant module is the size of a few conventional server racks and will be the key building block to reaching one millions qubits and to solving meaningful problems, leading to the opening up of a new global market,” said Christian Weedbrook, founder and CEO.
“Photonics has the advantage that networking these modules together is achieved using light, which is already the medium of choice for our quantum computer”.
“Based on their impressive team and progress, Xanadu impressed us as the leading contender to develop the first commercially valuable, photonic quantum computer,” said David Cowan, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “BVP is betting that in this decade quantum computers, like Xanadu’s, will make the conventional supercomputer look like an antiquated abacus.”