Startup Aliro Technologies is emerging from stealth today, landing $2.7 million in a seed funding round for its mission to democratize quantum computing.

Flybridge Capital Partners led the round, which also saw the participation of Crosslink Ventures and Samsung NEXT’s Q fund.

Aliro began its life as a project at Harvard University’s quantum computing lab. There, its founders built a dedicated software-as-a-service platform that makes it possible for any developer to get started in quantum computing, regardless of the hardware being used.

Quantum computing is a fundamentally different and vastly more powerful computer architecture that, although still nascent, has the potential to solve extremely complex problems that are impossible or would take years for today’s computers to tackle.

The main difference is quantum processing can take place in multiple states simultaneously. Whereas traditional computers use binary digits or “bits” that can be represented as 1 or 0, quantum computing uses “qubits” that can be “superpositioned,” allowing them to be represented as 1s, 0s or both states at the same time. In addition, qubits can use a method called superdense coding that allows them to hold two bits simultaneously. So two superpositioned bits held in one qubit means they can process four times the data of ordinary computers.

It all adds up to vastly more powerful computers that hold infinitely more potential than today’s classical machines.

The problem Aliro is trying to solve is that today’s nascent quantum computing systems are too difficult to use, Chief Executive Officer Jim Ricotta said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. One of the most pressing challenges is that there currently exists a “proliferation of hardware platforms” for quantum computing, and because they’re all quite different from one another, most developers simply don’t know where to begin.

“Today there are many types of quantum computers, and new architectures are still emerging,” Ricotta said. “These include superconducting circuits, trapped ions, photons, ‘cold’ atoms and topological qubits. These machines organize their quantum computing elements, or qubits, in different geometries, with different connectivity between the qubits. The machines have different noise characteristics and coherence times.”

What with so many architectures to choose from, it becomes increasingly difficult for developers to turn their algorithms into quantum programs and decide which hardware platform they should run on, Ricotta said.

So Aliro makes the choice of hardware a moot point for developers with its cross-platform software, which enables developers to write quantum apps just once and run them on any kind of quantum computing platform.

“This is why a software platform that hides this complexity from the software developer is so powerful,” Ricotta said.

Aliro’s software includes a set of tools for writing, compiling and then efficiently running quantum programs on a variety of quantum computers. They include validation schemes, compilers, optimizers, visualizations, benchmarks, error-correcting codes, application-specific interfaces and general performance improvements on one unified platform.

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