Horizon Quantum Computing, a Singapore-based company building software development tools to unlock the potential of quantum computing hardware, announced Friday that it has raised $18.1 million Series A investment from 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, Horizon Quantum Computing said in a statement.

According to the statement, the firm’s total funding now stands at approximately $21.3 million.

“Quantum computing has the potential to completely change how we think about computing,

“While getting to large scale quantum computing is a daunting challenge, it is undeniable that progress towards that goal is being made,” said Horizon’s Chief Executive Officer Dr Joe Fitzsimons.

At Horizon, he said the firm focuses 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,” he added.

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,

“At the same time, we believe that a tectonic shift will be driven by advancements in quantum hardware,” said Pieter Kemps, Partner, Surge at Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia.

“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,” he added.

According to the statement, 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.

The firm is focused on the second challenge, enabling domain experts to leverage quantum computing in their most demanding computational workloads.

It is also building a system for quantum software development that enables developers to bridge the gap between classical code and quantum accelerated applications.

It is noted that the firm has already reached key milestones in its technology development, demonstrating advanced compilation techniques, algorithm synthesis and rapid device characterization.

At the Q2B conference in Silicon Valley in December 2022, Horizon Quantum Computing demoed its integrated development environment and announced it would be launching an early access program this year.

Last year, the firm also joined Singapore’s National Quantum-Safe Network and has recently seen the first data transmission from its node.

Its 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.

Founded in 2018, Horizon Quantum Computing is a firm that developing a new generation of programming tools to simplify and expedite the process of developing software for quantum computers.

By removing the need for prior quantum computing experience to develop applications for quantum hardware, the firm’s tools will make the power of quantum computing accessible to every software developer.

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