top | item 8165177

Rigetti Computing (YC S14) Raises $2.5M to Create Commercial Quantum Systems

44 points| paul | 11 years ago |techcrunch.com | reply

23 comments

order
[+] crigetti|11 years ago|reply
@FiatLuxDave - Great questions, thank you! We are building quantum computing systems. We have a simulation-driven development process for the hardware, both the quantum and classical parts of the system, and that helps us keep costs down.

For challenge problems, that's a great idea. We're focused on applications to computational chemistry and machine learning, among others, right now.

[+] crigetti|11 years ago|reply
Hi everyone! I'm Chad Rigetti, the founder of Rigetti Computing. I'd love to answer any questions you may have. Chad
[+] FiatLuxDave|11 years ago|reply
Hi Chad!

So, if I understand it correctly, Rigetti Computing is planning on simulating how the software for a quantum computer will provide better performance than classical computing, and otherwise do useful stuff. This sounds like an interesting part of the quantum computing ecosystem, assuming that such an ecosystem evolves.

So, a few questions would be:

a) what does RC offer that is not already being provided by the academic algorithmic community?

b) are you making the assumption that hardware specifics do not have any effect upon your goals? if so, how confident are you that this is true? does the DWave quantum annealing issue play into this at all?

c) do you have any customers lined up yet?

d) do you have any kind of 'challenge problem' which you think would be particularly good at demonstrating what RC (as opposed to QC in general) can do?

Best of luck on your startup!

[+] orgiazzi|11 years ago|reply
Great to hear that there is space in this industry for new companies beyond BBN, IBM and Northrop Grunman!

Have you already applied for funding with Quantum Valley Investments (http://quantumvalleyinvestments.com)? If not you should do so! The funding is not restricted to Canadian or Waterloo Ontario based research, as far as I know.

Are you gonna run HFSS/Comsol/ADS/Qutip... on Amazon EC2, scalable at will, or are you going to invest in your own parallel computing hardware? I can imagine a big chunk of this initial funding is going to go into buying a couple HPC pack licenses...

Best of luck!

Jean-Luc Orgiazzi

[+] scythe|11 years ago|reply
What sort of qubits are y'all using? I'm guessing "superconducting", because only those seem to be close to the [published] error thresholds right now.
[+] gaze|11 years ago|reply
You guys gonna sell some JPCs?
[+] levlandau|11 years ago|reply
@crigetti details are sparse both in the article and on your website. Quantum Computing is a pretty dear topic to me and so it'd be great to hear some more high level details on what it is Rigetti does. Merci Beaucoup.
[+] crigetti|11 years ago|reply
Hi Lev - Our mission is to deliver fault-tolerant quantum computing systems and services to the commercial market. We're currently prototyping our technology at the small scale i.e. < 20 qubits. Once this validation is complete, we intend to scale up to much larger systems.
[+] technotony|11 years ago|reply
Really excited about the potential of systems like this for simulating biological processes. Imagine being able to simulate the design of biological parts on a computer rather than having to test in-vivo - making development faster and cheaper. This will transform the field of synthetic biology.
[+] saryn|11 years ago|reply
Are you building on D-Wave Systems computers, or building your own?

If your own, what architecture?

[+] crigetti|11 years ago|reply
Hi saryn - we're building gate-based systems and working towards quantum error correction. We've developed our own physical architecture for the processor that we believe is highly scalable and much cheaper than other approaches.
[+] gaze|11 years ago|reply
No. He's likely doing transmons