Multiverse Targets ‘Quantum Computing for the Masses’

Enrique lizaso, CEO of Multiverse Computing, said: "The fair price feature on our singularity platform is designed to give financial institutions an advantage in portfolio optimization using our preferred partner ionq's quantum computer. It is a perfect complement to singularity products, enabling the financial community to easily use today's quantum computing to achieve proven value, even in the early stages of the industry."

Singularity is jointly developed by quantum scientists and financial industry professionals. It provides intuitive and simple front ends and plug-ins for common PC based applications such as Microsoft Excel. Financial professionals can obtain the power of quantum computing without quantum related knowledge. "We are quantum computing for the public," said Sam mugel, co-founder and chief technology officer of multiverse.

Mugel said that all you need to interact with multiverse is the ubiquitous Excel spreadsheet, which is a tool familiar to quantitative financial analysts.

Multiverse currently cooperates with Cr é DIT Agricole CIB under Cr é DIT Agricole group, the world's 12th largest banking group, BBVA, one of the world's largest financial institutions, and other major companies in the financial industry.

Determine the best hardware and algorithm type according to different problems

Multiverse’s broad idea is to deliver quantum computing solutions that match the problem tackled with the most appropriate underlying quantum technology. It’s a software company with extensive relationships within the quantum hardware community. The Fair Pricing product, for example, relies heavily on Monte Carlo simulation. For this application, Multiverse is leveraging IonQ’s trapped ion quantum computer. Portfolio optimization, the other product currently in the Singularity suite, has a different set of requirements. Multiverse uses D-Wave’s quantum annealing computer for this application.

“Monte Carlo can only be run on certain types of machines, which are universal quantum computers or gate model quantum computers. For optimization, we’re using analog quantum computing. Quantum annealing is a very specific type of architecture. What you’re really looking to do is solve an optimization problem and there’s are very efficient way of doing this quantum mechanically. We found there’s a very nice correspondence between the portfolio optimization tool, and the problem that’s natively solved by D-Wave. At the moment, we have a bank that has access to the code and is playing around with it and seeing if they want to put it into production,” said Mugel.

Sam Mugel, CTO, Multiverse Computing

“At least in the short- or medium-term, I believe that we’re going to continue seeing different platforms. For instance, take the Fair Pricing tool that we developed; we don’t actually need that many qubits for it. What we do need is very high fidelity and fully-connected architectures. It’s important that any qubit can talk to any other, and that we have many gates. We need very high [circuit] depths. Error rates really compound if you’re not careful. In this case, ion trap architectures were a godsend. But if we tried to apply ion trap architectures to portfolio optimization, they might not work as well. In portfolio optimization, we need lots of qubits, so that we can look at lots of assets. It doesn’t really matter if there’s lots of errors because even a suboptimal portfolio is actually already really quite interesting,” said Mugel.

Establish extensive cooperation with quantum hardware companies

Formed in 2019, with a headcount of roughly 35 and growing, Multiverse is one of many start-ups seeking to build on quantum research that’s already done. They seek to act as a translating layer (for lack of a better term) to enable enterprises to use quantum computing. Like most quantum computing newcomers, Multiverse’s staff is dominated by Ph.D. mathematicians and quantum researchers. Mugel’s Ph.D., for example, was in cold atom quantum computing (link to founders).

Based in Spain, Multiverse is one of seven companies that recently formed a consortium (Amatech, BBVA, DAS Photonics, GMV, Multiverse computing, Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech y Repsol) and launched the CUCO Project to foster quantum computing research and development in Spain. The CUCO effort is another example of burgeoning state-funded efforts around the world; CUCO is aimed at implementing medium-term private-public quantum projects.

"We are working with CuCo on a very ambitious project on how to solve the calculation of quantum machine learning types on ultracold atoms," mugel said.

In addition, multiverse has established extensive cooperation with quantum hardware companies. "We've done a lot of work on IBM's architecture, as well as in the field of portfolio optimization. We're working with an ultracold atom company. The scalability of ultracold atom quantum computing is very good. This problem is interesting: you can access more qubits, but the error rate will become higher, but the connectivity will be better. Therefore, they may be more suitable for some applications Types of problems, such as hybrid computing, variational computing, etc., "mugel said.

"We also work with photonic architecture and are partners and supporters of Xanadu. We are considering applying their architecture to the energy market. This is very interesting. A customer who is not in the financial field came to us and said, 'Hey, we have a problem that is actually very similar to portfolio optimization,' we replied that there may be a suitable solution to this problem A way to solve the problem. "

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