Pascala Paris-based quantum computing startup, announced today that it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round from Singapore. temasek. In addition to Temasek, existing investors Quantonation, Defense Innovation Fund, Daphni and Eni Next, as well as new investors European Innovation Council (EIC), Wa’ed Ventures and Bpifrance (through its Large Venture Fund) also participated in this round. . .
What makes Pasqal, which was founded in early 2019, stand out in an increasingly crowded field of quantum computing startups is that the company is betting on neutral atom quantum computing. This is a relatively new and potentially innovative approach to building quantum processors. Instead of trapped ions (like IonQ) or superconducting quantum computers (like IBM), neutral atom quantum processors use lasers to hold atoms in place with what is essentially an optical tweezer.
As you can imagine, building the technology to contain a single atom, and only a single atom, in this trap created its own challenges, but it’s a largely solved problem now. The advantage here is that once you can do this with hundreds of atoms at the same time, you can create a very dense array of qubits and one that, using holographic methods, you can rearrange in 3D space as needed for a given algorithm. And all this happens at room temperature. That almost makes these machines look more like field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) than more traditional quantum processors. You can find an article by Pasqal on this process with more details. here and it’s also worth noting that Alain Aspect, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum entanglement in 2022, is one of the co-founders of Pasqal.
Image Credits: Pascal
As Pasqal’s co-founder and CEO Georges-Olivier Reymond told me, the company has already shown that it can control more than 300 atoms at a time. “It’s very difficult to have a single atom in a laser beam and monitor and control it,” he explained. “But once you get that, you can almost easily scale it up, and you can create arrangements in any way you want.” He noted that qubits are similar to ion-based qubits in terms of their coherence time and fidelity, but this flexibility and ability to pack these atoms into a very dense array, with only a couple of microns between qubits, could give this technology an advantage.
Reymond noted that with some of these basic capabilities now in place, the team is working on building the quantum control system so that it can start implementing quantum algorithms. And while there are startups focused on building quantum control hardware, none of them are optimized for neutral atoms, he noted, so the company decided to build its own system.
Clearly, Pasqal’s team is quite optimistic about their system, and Reymond believes that the team will be able to show potential customers a “quantum business edge” by 2024. He believes this will require a system with 200 to 300 qubits.
At this point, most researchers believe that we will not see the industry trend towards a single technology to solve each algorithm. Instead, different quantum technologies will find their sweet spots to solve different problems. For Pasqal, the team believes their system will work especially well for graphics-focused problems. “There are many computational challenges that you can reframe in graphical form,” he explained. “What we can do with atoms is represent the shape of this graph and integrate the complexity of the algorithm into this geometry. In the end, instead of using thousands of quantum gates, just by implementing a couple of them, you can run your algorithm and then you are error resistant.”
The company is currently working with companies such as Crédit Agricole CIB, BASF, BMW, Siemens, Airbus, Johnson & Johnson and Thales to help them understand where its technology can solve their business needs.
“We are very proud of this new milestone in the development of PASQAL that will make the company a world leader,” said Christophe Jurczak, Managing Partner of Quantonation. “Quantonation has supported the company since its spin-off from the Institut d’Optique. It is the first expansion within the Quantonation portfolio and really illustrates the excellence of French research and the competitiveness of the French quantum ecosystem.”
