Bristol-based Phasecraft, a quantum algorithms company, announced on Wednesday that it has secured £13M (approximately €15M) in a Series A round of funding led by Silicon Valley deep tech VC Playground Global.
AlbionVC and existing investors Episode 1, Parkwalk Advisors, LCIF, and UCL Technology Fund also participated in the round.
The latest funding brings the total amount raised to £17.25M (approximately €20.21M) in venture funding and a further £3.75M (approximately €4.3M) in grant funding from the likes of Innovate UK and the European Research Council.
Phasecraft says it will use the funds to continue building a team of world-leading quantum scientists, researchers, and engineers and to further establish its position as the world leader in quantum algorithms.
Phasecraft will also use this funding to advance its quantum algorithms to the stage of practical quantum advantage. It refers to the point at which quantum computers surpass classical computers in performing valuable real-world tasks, such as the creation of novel materials.
What does Phasecraft solve?
Quantum computing promises to revolutionise the way humanity tackles its most complex problems. However, existing quantum computers, known as Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices, are plagued by instability and noise, rendering them incapable of executing the algorithms currently available for these challenges.
Prior to the founding of Phasecraft, even the most advanced quantum algorithms would demand billions of quantum operations to perform practical tasks like simulating and discovering new battery materials. Yet, the current top-performing hardware can manage only thousands of operations.
While significant investments have accelerated the capabilities of such hardware, the necessary algorithms to leverage these advancements have largely remained theoretical. Thus far, no quantum computer has successfully applied algorithms to address practical problems.
Phasecraft is addressing this disparity by fundamentally rethinking the design of quantum algorithms.
Ashley Montanaro, co-founder and CEO of Phasecraft, says, “For all the advances that have been made in quantum hardware, and for all quantum computing’s promise, such progress could end up being for nothing if we can’t build the applications needed to make the technology truly useful.”
“With our record-breaking algorithms and groundbreaking techniques, we are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in this space. With support from such a renowned deep-tech visionary as Playground, we think the practical quantum advantage is achievable in years, not decades,” adds Montanaro.
Phasecraft: Accelerating quantum computing
Founded in 2019 by Toby Cubitt, Ashley Montanaro, and John Morton as a spinout from UCL and the University of Bristol, Phasecraft is a quantum algorithms company with a mission to accelerate the practical application of quantum computing.
The company does it by redesigning quantum algorithms for today’s imperfect quantum computers.
Phasecraft works with leading quantum hardware companies, including Google, IBM, and Rigetti, academic and industry leaders, to develop high-efficiency algorithms to move quantum computing from experimental demonstrations to useful applications.
Phasecraft’s early focus is on applying these algorithmic improvements to discover new materials for the clean energy transition.
The company has already developed a software pipeline that delivers an improvement of 1,000,000x or more in modelling real materials, bringing the number of operations required to model a material down to around 80,000.
The UK company has published 17 scientific papers with results including reducing the complexity of simulating the time-evolution of a quantum materials system by 400,000x, running the largest-ever simulation of a materials system on actual hardware by 10x.
The Investor
Playground Global is an early-stage venture capital that invests in start-ups across deep tech and science, including automation, infrastructure, engineered biology, and decarbonisation.
Peter Barrett, general partner at Playground Global, says, “Phasecraft’s team of world-class quantum scientists and engineers bring an unmatched expertise and a fresh perspective to one of the biggest challenges facing our quantum future – bridging the gap between quantum hardware capacity and real-world applications. At Playground, we’ve always believed that unlocking quantum’s potential requires a very special, dedicated, and experienced team and we believe Phasecraft is uniquely positioned to help deliver our quantum future.”
