IQM Quantum Computers, which claims to be the European leader in building superconducting quantum computers, announced that it has raised €128 million ($128m) in Series A2 funding led by World Fund to “expand its international business and accelerate product development to tackle the world’s most pressing problems.”
The funding, which follows a €39m ($39m) Series A1 announcement in 2020 and includes part of a €35m ($35m) venture loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB) announced earlier this year, “makes it the largest ever funding round raised by a European quantum computing company.”
The investment round “included participation from Bayern Kapital, EIC Fund, OurCrowd, QCI SPV, Tofino and Varma, as well as existing investors Maki.vc, Matadero QED, MIG Fonds, OpenOcean, Salvia GmbH, Santo Venture Capital GmbH, Tencent, Tesi, and Vsquared.”
Since launching in 2018, IQM has “become the fastest-growing quantum computer company and has cemented its position as the European leader in building superconducting quantum computers.”
IQM is also “the only European company that is already delivering full-stack quantum systems. According to BCG, the technology could create up to $850 billion in value globally over the next 15-30 years as it scales up and improves accuracy and stability.”
As an enabling technology that can deliver supercharged, precise computer power that is immensely more advanced than any supercomputer, it is expected “to improve drug discovery, transform encryption and data protection, and predict financial systems.” For example, a problem that “could take a supercomputer 10,000 years to solve would take a quantum computer only four minutes.”
With one of the largest teams of world-class quantum experts on the continent, IQM’s on-premise quantum computers are “used by research laboratories and supercomputing centres to address challenging problems in healthcare, finance, logistics and chemistry.”
The company’s innovative co-design strategy also “enables industrial customers to work closely with IQM to achieve quantum advantage based on application-specific processors.”
Since the company was founded, IQM’s mission statement has been “to use its technology for the well-being of humankind and that extends to tackling the climate crisis.”
Lacklustre attempts by world governments and global companies to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees by 2050 have “made it increasingly clear that drastic action is needed to discover the solutions that will actually make a difference to the planet.”
In the future, quantum computing could be “integral to finding resolutions to climate issues due to the technology’s ability to model solutions that would previously be impossible to achieve through current levels of computing power, with McKinsey forecasting that climate technologies developed using quantum computing could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by seven gigatons a year by 2035.”
This could include helping “to decarbonise power and fuel, re-shaping industrial operations and reforming food and forestry.”
With this new investment, IQM is also “dedicating resources to co-designing quantum computer processors to provide solutions to tackle the climate crisis and promote sustainable development to improve lives around the world.”
Due to the leap in computing power that IQM’s quantum computers would provide, its technology could “enable innovation in areas such as energy grid optimisation and climate modelling.”
Already, the company is “exploring novel approaches to develop better battery solutions with a leading car manufacturer, as well as ground-breaking methods for new material design and quantum algorithms that can be used to tackle climate problems.”