Joe Fitzsimons’ Horizon Quantum Computing will put Ireland in the epicentre of the next technological revolution.
Horizon Quantum Computing, the quantum computing business founded and led by Irishman Joe Fitzsimons, has raised $18.1m in a Series A investment involving Sequoia Capital India, Tencent, SGInnovate, Pappas Capital and Expeditions Fund.
The investment round will boost the growth of the company, allowing it to strengthen its science and engineering teams to accelerate product development, establish its new engineering centre in Europe and bring Horizon’s unique technology to the market.
“Quantum computing has the potential to completely change how we think about computing”
Horizon Quantum Computing’s total funding now stands at approximately $12.3m.
In November, ThinkBusiness reported how Fitzsimons’ Horizon Quantum Computing, a business he started in Singapore, is to create 10 new jobs over the next six months.
A vision for the future of tech
“Quantum computing has the potential to completely change how we think about computing,” says Horizon’s CEO Dr Joe Fitzsimons.
“While getting to large scale quantum computing is a daunting challenge, it is undeniable that progress towards that goal is being made. At Horizon, we focus on unlocking the power of future quantum computers, and have made significant headway towards our goal of enabling conventional software developers to take advantage of the technology through abstraction and automated algorithm synthesis. The new investment will support our effort to break through the barriers to useful quantum computation.”
Sequoia Capital India and SGInnovate, which led Horizon’s Seed+ and Seed rounds respectively, both reconfirmed support of the company’s ambition to provide tools to make programming of quantum computers as accessible and efficient as it is for conventional computers today.
“We have been bullish on the developer economy thesis for a long time,” says Pieter Kemps, Partner, Surge at Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia.
“At the same time, we believe that a tectonic shift will be driven by advancements in quantum hardware. But unlocking quantum computing for the millions of developers is no small feat. Wouldn’t it be amazing if any developer could develop quantum algorithms with little to no prior quantum experience?
“This is the future that Horizon is enabling. We believe in Joe’s product vision around abstracting the underlying quantum physics to enable developers to create quantum software with ease, and we have been hugely impressed by the technological breakthroughs that the team has achieved in a short period of time.”
A quantum advantage
Quantum computing is a rapidly emerging technology that harnesses the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems too complex for classical computers.
However, quantum computing faces two main challenges to widespread adoption: the development of hardware capable of supporting quantum computation at scale and the creation of software tools that allow programmers to harness this hardware to solve real-world problems. Horizon Quantum Computing is focused on the second challenge, enabling domain experts to leverage quantum computing in their most demanding computational workloads. Horizon is building a system for quantum software development that enables developers to bridge the gap between classical code and quantum accelerated applications.
Horizon has already reached key milestones in its technology development, demonstrating advanced compilation techniques, algorithm synthesis and rapid device characterisation. At the Q2B conference in Silicon Valley in December 2022, Horizon demoed its integrated development environment and announced it would be launching an early access program this year.
Last year, Horizon also joined Singapore’s National Quantum-Safe Network and has recently seen the first data transmission from its node. Horizon’s participation in this network is a step towards fulfilling the company’s ambition of enabling secure and privacy-preserving access to cloud-based quantum computers
Horizon Quantum Computing has also recently announced that it is opening its first European offices in Ireland where it is building out its new engineering centre. The company is currently recruiting a software engineering team in Dublin to boost worldwide operations.
