PsiQuantum, the US quantum computing startup backed by $940 million in Australian and Queensland government funding, is reportedly looking to raise at least US$750 million (A$1.19 billion).
Reuters reports that the raise is underway at a US$6 billion (A$9.5bn) pre-money valuation, according to sources, with US investor BlackRock leading the fundraising effort
The California startup founded in Palo Alto in 2015 by expat Australian professors Jeremy O’Brien, Terry Rudolph, Mark Thompson and Dr Pete Shadbolt hopes to build the “world’s first useful quantum computer”. The startup has previously raised $700 million for its technology, which uses photons as a representation of qubits instead of electrons.
PsiQuantum’s founding team performed the world’s first lab demonstration of a two-qubit logic gate using single photons in Brisbane over 20 years ago, invented integrated quantum photonics and ‘fusion-based’ quantum computing, and made a prototype quantum processor available via the cloud in 2013.
Since then they’ve focused on the biggest challenge in quantum computing, mitigating the errors that occur and render them ineffective.
An artist’s impression of PsiQuantum’s Brisbane airport complex
While some Australian startups, such as Quantum Brilliance, which hopes to build a mobile quantum computer and Diraq, which is going to make a hybrid chip, have focused on hardware, others, such as Sydney infrastructure software startup Q-CTRL have focused on ways to reduce quantum computing’s error problem.
PsiQuantum’s goal is the whole box and dice. A year ago it controversially landed $940 million (US$620m) in loans and equity from the federal and Queensland governments to build its first quantum computer in Brisbane, adjacent to the capital’s airport, by 2027.
Last month, PsiQuantum announced it had developed a quantum photonic chipset, called Omega, for utility-scale quantum computing. The chipset contains all the advanced components required to build million-qubit-scale quantum computers.
This week Blackbird backed another quantum startup, leading a $2 million pre-Seed round for Iceberg Quantum, which is developing faster and cheaper fault-tolerant architectures for quantum computing.
The year-old startup is teaming up with PsiQuantum, which will use Iceberg’s fault-tolerant quantum architectures on its photonics platform.
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