Software firm Horizon Quantum Computing secures $18.1m in Series A round

Horizon Quantum Computing, a Singapore-based company that develops software tools for quantum computing hardware, has announced it raised $18.1m in Series A investment from Sequoia Capital India, Tencent, SGInnovate, Pappas Capital, and Expeditions Fund.

The funding will allow the company to strengthen its science and engineering teams, establish a new engineering centre in Europe and bring its unique technology to the market. Horizon Quantum Computing has a total funding of approximately $21.3m.

Horizon Quantum Computing is developing a system for quantum software development that enables developers to bridge the gap between classical code and quantum accelerated applications.

The company focuses on enabling domain experts to leverage quantum computing in their most demanding computational workloads. Quantum computing faces two main challenges to widespread adoption: the development of hardware capable of supporting quantum computation at scale and the creation of software tools that allow programmers to harness this hardware to solve real-world problems. Horizon Quantum Computing is focused on the second challenge.

Pieter Kemps, Partner, Surge at Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia, said, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if any developer could develop quantum algorithms with little to no prior quantum experience? This is the future that Horizon is enabling. We believe in Joe’s product vision around abstracting the underlying quantum physics to enable developers to create quantum software with ease, and we have been hugely impressed by the technological breakthroughs that the team has achieved in a short period of time.”

Horizon has already reached key milestones in its technology development, demonstrating advanced compilation techniques, algorithm synthesis and rapid device characterisation. At the Q2B conference in Silicon Valley in December 2022, Horizon demoed its integrated development environment and announced it would be launching an early access program this year.

Horizon Quantum Computing also recently announced it is opening its first European offices in Ireland, where it is building out its new engineering centre. The company is currently recruiting a software engineering team in Dublin to boost worldwide operations.

Last year, Horizon joined Singapore’s National Quantum-Safe Network and has recently seen the first data transmission from its node. Horizon’s participation in this network is a step towards fulfilling the company’s ambition of enabling secure and privacy-preserving access to cloud-based quantum computers.

“Quantum computing has the potential to completely change how we think about computing,” said Horizon’s CEO Dr Joe Fitzsimons. “While getting to large scale quantum computing is a daunting challenge, it is undeniable that progress towards that goal is being made. At Horizon, we focus on unlocking the power of future quantum computers and have made significant headway towards our goal of enabling conventional software developers to take advantage of the technology through abstraction and automated algorithm synthesis. The new investment will support our effort to break through the barriers to useful quantum computation.”