Haiqu, an emerging quantum software company, today announced an $11 million seed round led by Primary Venture Partners, with participation from Qudit Investments led by John Donovan, Alumni Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Silicon Roundabout Ventures, Angel One Fund, and returning investors Toyota Ventures and Mac Venture Capital.
This fundraise will be used to accelerate the launch of Haiqu’s operating system (OS) for quantum applications: a hardware-aware quantum software stack for running near-term applications at 100x less computational cost than existing solutions.
“Quantum teams need to make empirical progress on hardware to close the gap toward industrially useful quantum applications,” said Richard Givhan, CEO and Co-founder of Haiqu “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. We are grateful to have found investors who recognize the ugly truth: middleware isn’t sexy, but it matters.”
Co-founded in 2022 by Richard Givhan, a Stanford-trained engineer, and Mykola Maksymenko, a former quantum researcher at Max Planck Society and Weizmann Institute, Haiqu develops software that overcomes limitations of modern quantum hardware to execute practical-scale applications today. The company’s quantum software significantly advances middleware through circuit optimization and error shielding, algorithmic subroutines like data-loading, and software orchestration to run more complex applications with significantly fewer resources.
“Angel One Fund’s decision to join the Haiqu round is driven by the company’s focus on one of the key bottlenecks in quantum computing — developing software that increases the efficiency of modern quantum computers and reduces the impact of errors, bringing their practical business applications closer to reality. For us, participation in this round is an opportunity to support a technology at the intersection of deep tech and enterprise that has the potential to become a critically important infrastructure layer for the industry in the coming years. The decisive factors included the strength of the team, the applied value of the solution, validated market demand through early partnerships and pilot projects with major industry players, as well as the presence of a strong international lead investor and the participation of funds with deep deep-tech expertise,” explained Ivan Petrenko, Managing Partner of Angel One Fund.
Following work in anomaly detection that was affirmed by IBM and Bank of Montreal (BMO), Haiqu will leverage the funding to continue validating near-term quantum use cases in industries like finance, healthcare, aviation, life sciences, and more.
Haiqu will also use the funding to expand its global team, including the recent hire of Antonio Mei, former Principal Technical PM from Microsoft Quantum, as Lead Product Manager who will lead the launch of Haiqu’s OS.
Researchers are invited to apply for Haiqu’s Early Access Program, a free beta program for its OS now open for select users to develop and run their applications across hardware modalities on Haiqu’s platform. Users can apply for the Early Access Program here.
To learn more about Haiqu and its work in machine learning, computational fluid dynamics and more, please visit the company’s new website.
About Haiqu
Haiqu is an emerging leader in quantum software that supports the notion that near-term, commercially viable quantum applications are achievable with the right software, even on current hardware. Haiqu’s hardware-agnostic software can run applications with up to 100x more operations on current devices compared to competitors. Based in New York City in the United States, Haiqu’s expert team members hail from all over the world, including the US, Canada, Ukraine, UK, EU, and Singapore, contributing to the company’s mission to make quantum computing practical as soon as possible.
