Xanadu closes $100M USD Series B to build a fault-tolerant photonic quantum computer

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May 25, 2021, 09:00 ET

The funding accelerates Xanadu's progress toward building a fault tolerant quantum computing module to reach one million physical qubits.

TORONTO, May 25, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Xanadu (https://xanadu.ai), the world leader in photonic quantum computing, has announced it has raised $100M USD in Series B financing. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round with participation from Capricorn, Tiger Global, BDC Capital, In-Q-Tel, along with returning investors Georgian, OMERS, and Tim Draper. The round brings Xanadu's total investment to date to $145M USD.

Xanadu was founded in 2016 to use particles of light for quantum computing to perform extremely fast and previously impossible computations at room temperature. "The strong interest from VC firms to fund this Series B financing demonstrates significant market confidence in Xanadu's photonic approach and our world-class team," said Christian Weedbrook, founder and CEO. "We believe this confidence is grounded in the significant advantages offered by photonics: The ability to leverage preexisting foundries and off-the-shelf optical components, and the capability to naturally network photonic chips together to form a larger quantum computer with one million qubits".

In order to solve important practical problems, a quantum computer needs to have error correction and fault tolerance. This corresponds to building a quantum computer with one million qubits along with other important hardware metrics. To reach this type of scale, a modular approach will be implemented where a number of smaller quantum chips are networked together.

This 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 Weedbrook. "Photonics has the advantage that networking these modules together is achieved using light, which is already the medium of choice for our quantum computer".

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. With these offerings, developers, customers, and scientific researchers can access the most cutting-edge computational tools to create new algorithms and design new products for solving real-world problems.

"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."

About Xanadu
Xanadu is a Canadian quantum technology company with the mission to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere. Founded in 2016, Xanadu has become one of the world's leading quantum hardware and software companies. The company also leads the development of PennyLane, an open-source software library for quantum computing and application development. Visit www.xanadu.ai or follow us on Twitter @XanaduAI.

SOURCE Xanadu