Chad Rigetti, Founder & CEO of Rigetti Computing
Today Rigetti Computing, a leading quantum computing start-up, announced it has raised $64 million in Series A and B funding.
Quantum computing will enable people to tackle a whole new set of problems that were previously unsolvable,” said Chad Rigetti, founder and chief executive officer of Rigetti Computing. “This is the next generation of advanced computing technology. The potential to make a positive impact on humanity is enormous.”
The Series A round of $24 million was led by Andreessen Horowitz. Vijay Pande, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has been appointed to Rigetti’s Board of Directors, joining Rigetti CEO Chad Rigetti and angel investor Charlie Songhurst. The Series B round of $40 million was led by Vy Capital, followed by Andreessen Horowitz.
Rigetti Computing was founded by Chad Rigetti in 2013 and has offices in Fremont and Berkeley, Calif. The company is building a cloud quantum computing platform for artificial intelligence and computational chemistry. Rigetti recently opened up private beta testing of Forest, its API for quantum computing in the cloud. Forest emphasizes a quantum-classical hybrid computing model, integrating directly with existing cloud infrastructure and treating the quantum computer as an accelerator.
Quantum computers store and process information using individual photons, enabling dramatically greater computational power and energy efficiency. Rigetti Computing has taken a highly interdisciplinary approach to developing the technology, with a team from diverse backgrounds in computer science, engineering, physics, and chemistry.
Quantum computing has promised breakthroughs in computing for decades but has so far remained elusive,” said Vijay Pande, Andreessen Horowitz general partner and Rigetti Board member. “Rigetti has assembled an impressive team of scientists and engineers building the combination of hardware and software that has the potential to finally unlock quantum computing for computational chemistry, machine learning and much more.”
The latest round brings the total amount of venture funding raised by Rigetti to $69.2 million. Major investors in both rounds include Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, Data Collective, FF Science, AME Cloud Ventures, Morado Ventures, and WTI. Institutional investors in Series A include Sutter Hill Ventures, Susa Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, Lux Capital, and Bloomberg Beta.
We will use the funding to expand our business and engineering teams and continue to invest in infrastructure to manufacture and deploy our quantum integrated circuits,” said Rigetti.
My name Rashad Badawy, I have got PhD degree from TU Berlin, 2016. I have already appropriate background about Quantum soft computing and quantum-inspired computing, and I have three published papers for “using the quantum-inspired evolution algorithm within the Smart Grid management (matching between supply and demand)”. I tried first to develop intelligent coordination and optimization algorithms for Smart Grid depending on (real) quantum computing (I wasted a lot of time in this trial), the main obstacles that I face the lack of test bed, the limited time and there is no team for cooperating and discussion. I am searching now for the next step after PhD, it will be great for me if there is available more details about your work, or more declaration about the “framework software” for testing/developing quantum computing algorithm.
Best regards,
Dr. Rashad Badawy