What happened to the world's first quantum software company
Founded in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on December 1, 2012, 1QB Information Technologies, Inc. (1QBit) is the world's first software company focused on quantum computing. It was awarded the 2015 Technology Pioneer Award by the World Economic Forum, which hailed it as a global leader in cutting-edge technology companies.
For a long time afterwards, there was no news or reports about the company in the market. On April 5 of this year, 1QBit suddenly announced that its quantum simulation division had become independent and formed a company called Good Chemistry, which had even received a seed round of funding led by Green Sands Equity, Accenture and WorldQuant Ventures.
By careful calculation, it has been more than 10 years since the establishment of 1QBit, how is the company doing now?
01A technology company with a financial background
History is always surprisingly similar! The world's first quantum computing hardware company, D-Wave Systems, was born in BC, Canada, and the world's first quantum computing software company, 1QBit, was also born there. 2011, D-Wave sold its first quantum annealing computer, and perhaps seeing the business opportunity of quantum computing, several investors joined forces to establish 1QBit in 2012, focusing on quantum computing software development.
1QBit's co-founder and CEO, Andrew Fursman, is a founding partner of the investment firm Minor Capital, and his educational experience all revolves around finance. Another co-founder, Landon Downs, has the exact same background and logically joined 1QBit as he was also a founding partner of Minor Capital.
Andrew Fursman
As an investor-founded company, how do you solve technical problems? In response, Fursman leveraged the educational resources of Canada, particularly the University of Waterloo, one of the world's top institutions in the field of quantum computing. The Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo has been in existence for 20 years now. 1QBit has attracted several quantum computing professionals from the University of British Columbia and the University of Waterloo since its inception.
For example, 1QBit's number one employee is Arman Zaribafiyan, who holds a PhD in quantum information from the University of British Columbia and is the founder of 1QBit's quantum simulation division. Pooya Ronagh, the current technical lead of 1QBit, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Quantum Computing and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on the synergy between mathematical programming, machine learning and quantum computing.
02Active collaboration with hardware companies
As a quantum computing software company, 1QBit has established hardware partnerships with Microsoft, IBM, Fujitsu, D-Wave, IonQ and others; not only developing general algorithms for quantum computing hardware, 1QBit is also involved in computational finance, materials science, quantum chemistry and life sciences.
1QBit positions itself as a software and consulting company that develops complex algorithms and software development tools to solve large and difficult problems using both classical methods and quantum computers. Because of their natural connection to D-Wave, much of their early work involved the utilization of quantum annealing hardware.
1QBit actively works with Fortune 500 customers and leading hardware vendors to solve industry problems in optimization, simulation, and machine learning. 1QBit's core product is the 1Qloud platform, which connects tough industry problems with new quantum-inspired optimization solutions for hardware, using quantum-inspired computing methods to solve routing, scheduling, planning, allocation, packaging, and the most complex optimization problems. The research team understands the unique benefits of each classical and quantum computing architecture and identifies the problems in the industry that are best suited to benefit from these new processing methods. Work with customers to develop new application approaches using quantum computing.
As the chart below shows, almost every year, 1QBit announces a major collaboration. Back in 2017, pharmaceutical giant Biogen announced a partnership with Accenture and 1QBit to bring quantum computing to the development of treatments for indications such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Lou Gehrig's disease. in April 2018, 1QBit joined the IBM Q Network - a collaboration between a global community of leading Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, startups and national research labs to explore the practical applications of quantum computing.
1QBit Development History
1QBit has been developing a materials simulation platform called QEMIST, a quantum-inspired molecular ab initio simulation toolkit. QEMIST aims to accurately compute molecular properties by leveraging the power of quantum computing and advanced problem decomposition (PD) techniques. With this technology, 1QBit entered into a collaboration with Microsoft. the various PD techniques implemented in QEMIST enable massively parallel simulations by decomposing computational chemistry tasks into smaller, independent subproblems. These subproblems, in turn, can use a combination of interfaces to various classical and quantum solvers to achieve higher accuracy for large-scale molecular simulations.
On May 31, 2019, 1QBit released the open source OpenQEMIST. the Microsoft Quantum Development Kit provides a scalable end-to-end quantum development environment and leverages the Microsoft Q# quantum programming language to enable users to perform quantum algorithm design, compilation, and simulation. These functions are extended by domain-specific libraries such as the Microsoft Quantum Chemistry Library and are available in Python through the Qsharp PyPI package.1QBit has been working closely with Microsoft's quantum team to use this package to connect the OpenQEMIST platform to the Microsoft Quantum Development Toolkit.
OpenQEMIST in the Microsoft Quantum Chemistry Library
On April 8, 2020, 1QBit announced the launch of 1QBit XrAI, a chest X-ray AI tool that significantly improves the accuracy and timeliness of diagnosing lung abnormalities. The company's first healthcare product received fast-track approval from Health Canada just one week after recently completing extensive clinical trials. 1QBit XrAI is the first artificial intelligence (AI) radiology platform device to be recognized by Health Canada as a Class III medical treatment.
2021 was a rewarding year for 1QBit. 1QBit demonstrated quantum error mitigation on IBM's quantum processor using neural network technology. In addition, after three years of collaboration and months of experimentation, 1QBit and Dow used IonQ's quantum processor to accurately calculate the electronic structure of the largest molecule ever analyzed using a quantum computer. Using density matrix embedding (DMET) theory as a problem decomposition technique and an ion-trap quantum computer, the team simulated a ring of 10 hydrogen atoms without freezing any electrons.
Efficient Electronic Structure Simulation on Quantum Computers
However, the seemingly smooth sailing of 1QBit announced the independence of its quantum simulation division, and the future of 1QBit, which is after all the core business of 1QBit, is suddenly in flux.
03Five long years without a single funding round
1QBit completed five rounds of financing in the first five years of its existence, particularly in 2017, when 1QBit announced the completion of a C$45 million Series B round, but then went five years without a single round of financing, raising doubts.
Because there has been a wave of quantum company financing worldwide in the last five years, with PsiQuantum raising $450 million in a single round, Xanadu raising $100 million in a single round, and companies such as National Shield Quantum, IonQ, Rigetti, D-Wave, and Arqit going public. And these quantum companies all have one thing in common, all of them are hardware companies.
From the perspective of financing, investors are more enthusiastic about quantum computing hardware, in fact, it is not difficult to understand, because the current quantum computing applications are not practical, software and algorithms at this stage depends mainly on the progress of hardware, so quantum computing hardware is placed in the top priority. In analogy to the development of classical computers, the earliest electronic computers were born in the 1940s, but it was not until the 1990s that the software market completely overtook the hardware market.
Quantum computing as a whole is in the early stage of development, quantum computing software companies are more like a premature baby, although 1QBit is the first to eat the crab, but in recent years in the financing market particles, combined with its quantum simulation division independent, can not help but cast a shadow on its development.
Good Chemistry is understood to have taken a large number of 1QBit's customers with it after independence, working with heavyweights including Dow, Amazon Web Services (AWS), DIC Corporation and Microsoft, with its core product QEMIST also attributed to Good Chemistry.
