This Startup Just Raised $21 Million To Bring Quantum Computing To Enterprise Applications

Zapata Computing, a quantum computing software program startup that spun out of Harvard, introduced on Wednesday to raise $21 million in a Series A round. The spherical became led by Prelude Ventures and Comcast Ventures and protected participation from Pillar VC, The Engine, BASF Venture Capital, Pitango Ventures, and Robert Bosch Venture Capital. The boost will carry the agency’s general funding to about $26.Forty-five million.

Unique amongst quantum computing startups, Zapata Computing isn’t interested in building quantum computer systems. Instead, it’s building software packages for one’s structures and helping big organizations discover answers that quantum computing makes possible, irrespective of what hardware the client is using.

“We’re growing a company-hardened software platform that lets in the domain experts to move as deep as they need, as well as abstract to a certain degree,” Zapata CEO Chris Savoie explained to me. “This isn’t always for the faint of heart. We’re not accessible, looking to educate an undergraduate pc science fundamentals on how to program a quantum computer. We’re years away from that.”

Zapata’s consciousness is now on packages wherein quantum computing can offer a few advantages over traditional supercomputing, specifically in 3 key areas: simulation of chemical reactions, system learning, and optimization problems, which can be of unique interest in regions like logistics and planning.

The startup was founded in 2017 and spun out of Alán Aspuru-Guzik, who has been working to apply quantum computing to chemical simulations. There have been four postdocs: physicist Peter Johnson and Jonny Olson; computer scientist Yudong Cao; and chemist Jhonathan Romero Montalvo. All of them have been running on one-of-a-kind applications of quantum computing, and it was in Aspuru-Guzik’s lab that their work grew into the premise for the organization.

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To run Zapata, the cofounders tapped Savoie as CEO. A serial entrepreneur and tech enterprise govt whose Ph.D. research had focused on molecular simulations. Apart from the businesses he’d previously founded, he’d additionally worked at Verizon and Nissan. His previous startup, OLED materials employer Kyulux, had licensed an AI era developed in Aspuru-Guzik’s lab, which began the relationship between the two.

After expressing frustration to Aspuru-Guzik over his two-times-monthly shuttles from Boston to Japan (“Which my spouse stated turned into not a tenable business plan,” Savoie joked), Aspuru-Guzik invited Savoie to meet with the Zapata founding crew.