Phasecraft raises £13m to reach quantum advantage for power materials
UK university spinout Phasecraft has raised £13m to develop its quantum algorithms to the point of practical quantum advantage for new electronic materials.
Phasecraft was founded in 2019 as a spinout from UCL and the University of Bristol by Professors Ashley Montanaro (CEO), Toby Cubitt (CTO and Chief Science Officer) and John Morton and will use the funding to allow quantum to computers outperform classical computers for useful real-world applications such as developing new materials, known as the quantum advantage.
Its work is informed by industry partnerships including speciality materials developer Johnson Matthey and solar cell developer Oxford PV.
- Phasecraft, Oxford PV to use quantum computer to find new materials
- UK quantum software startup teams with IBM
- Rigetti launches 84qubit single chip quantum processor
The best quantum algorithms for simulating and discovering a new battery material have previously would require billions of operations on a quantum computer – today’s best-performing hardware can perform at most thousands. Significant recent investment in such hardware has seen a dramatic increase in performance, but the algorithms needed to harness these advances have remained largely theoretical says Phasecraft
The company uses novel insights from theoretical physics and computer science, coupled with knowledge gained from extensive numerical simulations and a deep understanding of quantum hardware to develop record-breaking algorithms with significantly superior computational efficiency. The company is already working with Google, IBM and Rigetti to put these algorithms to work in the real world. Rigetti however this week signed a deal with another UK quantum algorithm developer Riverlane to run on its 84qubit single chip quantum processor.
Phasecraft researchers have 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, and proving for the first time ever that quantum optimisation algorithms can outperform classical ones.
The Series A funding round led by Silicon Valley deeptech VC, Playground Global. AlbionVC also joined the round along with participation from existing investors Episode1, Parkwalk Advisors, LCIF, and UCL Technology Fund.
- First UK ‘Knowledge Intensive’ deeptech university fund
- Cambridge GaN Devices secures funding to scale mass production
- Sony invests in UK-based quantum computing scale-up
Phasecraft’s early focus is on applying these algorithmic improvements to the discovery of new materials important for the clean energy transition. Classical computing fails to capture many of these materials’ fundamental features, meaning we rely on experimental discovery which can take decades. Quantum computing promises to accelerate the entire process by capturing these features computationally, thus reducing the number of experiments required and drastically increasing the variety of material combinations which can be tested for any given use case.
A software pipeline which delivers an improvement of 1,000,000x or more in modelling real materials compared with the best previous quantum algorithms, bringing the number of operations required to model a material down to around 80,000 and within touching distance of existing hardware capability.
The new funding brings the total raised by Phasecraft to £17.25M in venture funding, as well as a further £3.75M in grant funding from Innovate UK and the European Research Council, which will be used to continue building the team.
“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 practical quantum advantage is achievable in years, not decades,” said Ashley Montanaro, co-founder and CEO of Phasecraft.
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
