BlueQubit Inc., a San Francisco-based quantum software startup, announced Thursday it has raised $10 million in seed funding to expand its platform and bridge the gap between the technology and real-world applications.

Nyca Partners led the round with participation from Restive, Chaac Ventures, Presto Tech Horizons, NKM Capital and BigStory VC.

Founded by Stanford alumni in 2022, BlueQubit provides a managed quantum-software-as-a-service platform designed to simplify the ability of enterprise companies to tap into this emerging technology. Using the platform, businesses can access quantum processing units, or QPUs, and powerful software emulators to develop and test algorithms before deployment.

“Quantum technology is not just a buzzword; it’s the next frontier of computational power,” said Hrant Ghairbyan, co-founder and chief executive of BlueQubit.

Quantum computing has the potential to provide fast solutions to the most challenging computational problems faced in chemistry, drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling and supply-chain optimization. Some of these problems persist as issues that classical computers would take hundreds or thousands of years to solve while quantum algorithms can resolve them in minutes.

Recent developments in quantum computing hardware, such as Google LLC’s recent debut of Willow, its current state-of-the-art quantum computing chip, have demonstrated that quantum is improving at solving complex problems. For instance, Willow can solve a problem requiring billions of years for even the world’s second-fastest supercomputer, Frontier. This was accomplished by Google’s new chip in under five minutes.

In the past few years, quantum computing firms such as IonQ Inc. and D-Wave Quantum Inc., as well as established companies such as IBM Corp., have rolled out quantum platforms designed to serve practical commercial applications. More businesses are beginning to look into quantum capabilities as they become increasingly more powerful and reliable, BlueQubit said.

BlueQubit’s platform allows developers to build quantum algorithms using existing industry software development kits such as Cirq and Qiskit and test them in quantum simulators tapping into large-scale fleets of graphics processing units. The company said its framework supports a multitude of quantum simulation use cases including financial modeling, pharmaceutical development and visualization.

“Our platform is designed to empower researchers and developers alike,” said co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Hayk Tepanyan. “We’re not just developing quantum software; we’re creating an ecosystem where quantum hardware, software and enterprise use cases coalesce.”

Tepanyan added that the investment will allow the company to expand its quantum ecosystem to empower enterprise developers to deploy more quantum use cases such as future industry developments, including advanced quantum artificial intelligence models for materials discovery and risk analysis tools.

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