Ukrainian quantum-software startup Haiqu has announced 11 million dollars in funding in an investment round led by Primary Venture Partners. Other investors participating in the round include Toyota Ventures, MacVenture Capital, Qudit Investments and Silicon Roundabout Ventures, Reuters reports, citing Haiqu’s press release.
According to estimates by McKinsey, the overall quantum technology market could reach 100 billion dollars.
“Today, far too few experiments are being conducted because the costs of quantum cloud technologies are too high and hardware performance remains insufficient. Our goal is to change this overnight with software that can run large applications at significantly lower cost,” said Richard Given, CEO and co-founder of Haiqu.
Ukrainian co-founder Mykola Maksymenko noted that an IBM experiment that required around 50,000 dollars and 10 hours of quantum-computer time could be performed on Haiqu’s platform in under one minute and for up to 100 dollars.
Haiqu was founded in 2022 and has offices in Ukraine, the United States and Europe. According to Maksymenko, Haiqu currently employs several dozen specialists. The Ukrainian division focuses on R&D and develops high-performance numerical methods, AI, infrastructure and software.
The funding raised will be used to develop Haiqu’s own operating system for quantum computing, which is intended to simplify the execution of applied quantum tasks and significantly reduce computing costs compared with existing approaches.
