Quantum software startup Haiqu Inc. announced today that it has raised $11 million in new funding to accelerate the launch of its operating system for quantum applications, which will include a hardware-aware quantum software stack for running near-term applications at 100 times less computational cost than existing solutions.

Founded in 2022 by Richard Givhan, a Stanford-trained engineer and Mykola Maksymenko, a former quantum researcher at Max Planck Society and Weizmann Institute, Haiku is developing software that overcomes limitations of modern quantum hardware to execute practical-scale applications today.

The company’s quantum software is designed to significantly advance middleware through circuit optimization and error shielding, algorithmic subroutines like data loading and software orchestration. The goal is to run more complex applications with significantly fewer resources.

Haiqu is focused on making near-term quantum computing commercially useful by providing a hardware-aware software stack that allows organizations to run larger and more meaningful workloads on today’s quantum systems. The idea is that rather than waiting for fully fault-tolerant quantum hardware, the company’s operating system can extract more value from existing devices by reducing the computational cost, cloud usage and experimental overhead that currently limit real-world quantum experimentation.

The company’s platform is focused on practical use cases across industries such as finance, healthcare, aviation and life sciences.

“Quantum teams need to make empirical progress on hardware to close the gap toward industrially useful quantum applications,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Givhan. “Today, too little experimentation happens because quantum cloud costs are prohibitive and hardware performance remains insufficient. Our goal is to change that overnight with a software system that can run larger applications at a fraction of the cost.”

The seed funding round was led by Primary Venture Partners LP. Qudit Investments LP, Alumni Ventures Group, Collaborative Fund LP, Silicon Roundabout Ventures LP, Toyota Ventures and Mac Venture Capital LP also participated.

“Quantum computing must demonstrate commercial advantage over classical compute in some domain in order to scale,” said Brian Schechter, partner at Primary Venture Partners. “The premise underlying our investment in Haiqu is that software is essential to realize this goal.”

Haiqu will also use the funding to expand its global team, including the recent hire of Antonio Mei, former principal technical product manager from Microsoft Quantum, as lead product manager, who will lead the launch of Haiqu’s OS.

Image: Haiqu