We’re still years away from seeing physical quantum computers break into the market with any scale and reliability, but don’t surrender on deep tech. The marketplace for high-level quantum computer science — which applies quantum principles to administer complex computations in areas like finance and artificial intelligence — appears to be quickening its pace.
In the most recent development, a startup out of San Sebastian, Spain, called Multiverse Computing is announcing that it has raised €25 million (or $27 million) in an equity funding round led by Columbus Enterprise Partners. The funding, which values the startup at €100 million ($108 million), might be utilized in two most important areas. The startup plans to proceed constructing out its existing business working with startups in verticals like manufacturing and finance; and it desires to forge recent efforts to work more closely with AI corporations constructing and operating large language models.
In each cases, the pitch is identical, CEO Enrique Lizaso-Olmos: “optimization.”
In other words, as computing becomes more advanced, it might be more costly and in some cases too complex to execute consistently. Multiverse’s pitch is that its software platform Singularity — designed to use across a wide selection of industries like finance, manufacturing, energy, cybersecurity and defense — may be used to run and optimize complicated modelling and predictive applications more efficiently.
In AI, the main focus is more squarely on applying the platform to compress Large Language Models, with a brand new product called CompactifAI honing in on the calculations which can be always being made when constructing and querying LLMs, to chop out more noise and speed up the work (and thus reliability) when producing results.
The corporate claims that it might compress LLMs “with quantum-inspired tensor networks” by greater than 80% with the software, while still producing accurate results. If true, that would have large implications for a way corporations buy and use processors, addressing considered one of the large bottlenecks within the industry to this point.
Lizaso-Olmos cuts a polymath figure, starting out his profession greater than 30 years ago by first qualifying as a medical doctor, then taking a second degree in mathematics, after which a 3rd in computer engineering with a Phd that somewhat tied this stuff together, a PhD in biostatistics. He then picked up an MBA, he said. Over the course of all that he picked up like-minded thinkers and friends, and a few of them — namely Roman Orus and Samuel Mugel — were taken with the concept of quantum software and were already making names for themselves through academic work across the subject.
“Multiverse began in a WhatsApp group,” he jokes. The yr was 2017, and for the thought experiment, a number of of them thought it “could be fun” to put in writing a scientific paper about what you might do with quantum in finance.
The paper ended up getting accepted for a conference going down on the university in Toronto, so that they went along to that. Arriving, Lizaso-Olmos saw that the paper was getting shared around and discussed and suddenly it looked like people might use it as inspiration for enterprising ambitions. That was when Lizaso-Olmos’s MBA-radar kicked in and he pulled his two friends together for a serious IRL chat.
And that’s how they, together with Alfonso Rubio, began Multiverse Computing.
That initial exploration of quantum and financial technology that was the topic of that paper became the corporate’s first industrial application, and where it picked up its first traction. Since then it has widened out into other sectors and counts Moody’s Analytics, Bosch, BASF, Iberdrola, Credit Agricole and BBVA amongst its customers, and Lizaso-Olmos says that together, industrial and energy clients, who just like the greener elements of more efficient computing, today actually account for more of the corporate’s business than finance.
Alongside Columbus, previous backer Quantonation Ventures also participated alongside recent backers just like the European Innovation Council Fund, Redstone QAI Quantum Fund, and Indi Partners.
“Multiverse’s exceptional team will soon apply their unparalleled capability to deliver quantum and quantum-inspired software solutions also inside the life sciences and biotechnology markets, where Columbus Enterprise Partners will help to discover unmet market needs and high-profile industrial partners,” Javier Garcia, a partner at Columbus Enterprise Partners, in a press release.
While the pitch to verticals seems to have connected with customers, what stays to be seen is how its ambition to go one level higher, to focus on deep tech and AI corporations themselves, might play out for Multiverse. Others competing in the identical space include the Alphabet spinout Sandbox AQ, Quantum Motion, and Classiq.
