The Australian quantum computing start-up aiming to deliver a commercial quantum device by 2028 has secured A$50.4 million of equity funding, well below the $130m series A raise target it had last September.
Silicon Quantum Computing was launched in 2017 with more than $83m of initial funding from the Australian Government, University of New South Wales, Commonwealth Bank, Telstra and the NSW Government.
SQC CEO professor Michelle Simmons said the new funding would enable the company to progress to “some of the next big milestones and technical hurdles”, including its work to advance development of logical atom-based quantum bits, or qubits, in silicon. SQC says the qubits represent the “most precise platform in the solid state for scalable quantum processors”.
The firm’s foundation intellectual property was developed at the Australian Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communications Technology by a team led by Simmons. It claims to have delivered the world’s first integrated circuit built at the atomic scale, and to be “on track to build a commercial quantum device by 2028”.
SQC is in a global race with US and Chinese tech giants to produce commercial quantum computing devices.
Quantum computing, with its potential to increase computing speeds exponentially beyond the range of current devices, is expected to transform most aspects of modern society.
