With $30 million in new funding, SEEQC thinks the chips are the most important part of building critical computers.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang may have said that “the most useful computers” may yet be 20 years awaybut his company is also hedging its bets beyond the chips money and relationships in the same space.

Now one of the companies that Nvidia has partnered with in the development of the quantity is announcing the investment. The value of SEEQCThe massive computing startup, has raised $30 million in funding led by Booz Allen Ventures and the Japanese-European VC company NordicNinja, supported by the new SIP Capital and others. “It’s a combination of capital, space and strategy,” SEEQC CEO John Levy said of the Series A expansion.

SEEQC is part of a fledgling group looking at how to better use old computers to run quantum processors. This will be necessary to manage the number of qubits, an important part of quantum computing, and to design hardware to suit data center and business needs.

SEEQC – whose name is an abbreviation of “scalable, energy efficient quantum computing,” and is pronounced “seek” – believes that the key to reducing the complexity of modern technology is to have chips that can consume all the energy necessary for a quantum computer. . For example, this makes it possible to control many qubits with a single string, as SEEQC believes is very important.

There is no denying that today’s prototypes often look bulky, just like computers did in the early days of IT. Levy thought that Google’s announcement on error correction skills His Willow quantum chip was “exciting” – but he couldn’t figure it out number of strings concerned.

“We have to see this (types of announcements), but we also have to see from a technical point of view, the ability to deal with the problems of cabling, speed, latency, cost, etc., the kinds of traditional things that you have to make big plans. And unless we do this, we cannot expand a business accounting center,” Levy said.

The rapid progress of AI has already proven the need for high-energy facilities, which quantum can make a reality, while opening new applications, such as accelerating the development of new materials and new drugs.

This explains why the German company BASF recently joined the UK-led SEEQC QuPharma service to explore how quantum computing can help the drug discovery process, in collaboration with Merck. “These companies know that quantum is going to be very important to their business,” Levy said.

This also explains why Merck’s corporate venture capital arm, M Ventures, invested in SEEQC. in 2020followed by other investors including EQT Ventures and LG Technology Ventures which eventually brought SEEQC’s support to the full venture. $22.4 million before the latest cycle.

That’s beside the SEEQC’s partnership with Nvidia. Announced in 2023, the agreement aims to create a “digital, ultra-low-latency chip-to-chip” link between quantum computers and GPUs, “which – when developed – will be compatible with all quantum computing technologies.

The new funding will help the founders accelerate the release of their chips and improve their innovation. But SEEQC has moved on earlier than you might expect from its 2019 debut, largely because it’s a chip company’s exit. Hypreswhich was founded by former employees of IBM’s superconducting electronics division.

“We started with a very mature technology, our equipment – we use very special machines for the types of chips that we make – IP, and a large group of people who have developed very high-quality systems, mainly through US government users,” said Levi.

Since then, the company has tripled the size of its team, which is based in London, UK and in Naples, Italy, where pre-spinout, the first version of its chip was built; but mostly in Elmsford, NY, where it plans to expand its chip base.

Quantum promises aside, this is also related to the importance of the chip that fights international conflicts, especially those related to China.

Different companies are attacking this problem in different ways, such as pictures, steel made of silicon and entanglement of ion qubits. The way it will be remains to be seen, but Levy believes it is important to think beyond qubits. “We have to have an architecture that will get us where we need to go, and chips will be at the center of that.”