The Engine, which was publicly announced on October 26, 2016, was built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  Prioritizing breakthrough ideas over early profit, The Engine represents an exciting new system for startup support, one that shortens the time from idea to investment, and from investment to impact.  To fuel The Engine, MIT is seeking to attract hundreds of millions of dollars of support and to provide hundreds of thousands of square feet of space for entrepreneurs in Kendall Square and nearby communities, starting with 26,000 square feet in its Central Square headquarters.  The Engine provides a physical space where an idea can begin to take shape. It also streamlines the legal processes and agreements required to get products to market. And it links entrepreneurs to “patient capital” from investors who share their vision of addressing big challenges with big ideas.  The Engine will eventually support up to 60 locally based startups concurrently; these companies will participate in the accelerator for up to 12 months. The Engine will make meaningful investments that will allow participating startups to get off the ground quickly and operate long enough to prove their concepts’ viability. It will also provide business planning, legal, and administrative support.  The Engine will require less equity than is typical, allowing founders to maintain more control over their companies and the ideas they’ve created.  Through the Engine Room, The Engine will provide access to a wide network of lab space, specialized equipment, business guidance, and other resources, at MIT and beyond.

The Engine

Glasswing Ventures is an early-stage VC firm investing in the next generation of AI and frontier technology startups enabling the rise of the intelligent enterprise. The firm is laser-focused on funding exceptional entrepreneurs who are leading the AI revolution, capitalizing on the intellectual might and talent from the premier academic institutions on the East Coast, and fostering growth for its ecosystem. Glasswing Ventures funds visionary entrepreneurs harnessing the power of AI and frontier technologies to transform markets and revolutionize industries. Glasswing Ventures was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Glasswing Ventures

E14 Fund are an investment fund focused on taking the biggest ideas hatched at MIT, deploying them to the real world, and scaling them for greatest impact.  At the E14 Fund, they help bring technologies out of the lab and into the world. Their network of advisors—investors, industry experts, and entrepreneurs—help their companies take prototypes to scale and raise further investment.  The E14 Fund supports companies across diverse fields—from biotechnology and smart cities to consumer electronics and manufacturing. They are a bridge that builds entrepreneurs from MIT and creates the paths to connect them with investors and industry experts who can help them scale. They believe diversity and inclusion are the seeds of innovation. Half of their companies have a female founder, and more than half have founders are from outside the United States.

The E14 Fund

US Innovative Technology Fund operates as an investment firm. They help early- and growth-stage technology firms with commercial and defense applications, such as defense tech, artificial intelligence, logistics, space, tech bio, and the future of computing.

US Innovative Technology Fund

MassVentures meets critical capital needs in the Massachusetts innovation economy, providing seed and early-stage venture funding to high growth startups as they move from concept to commercialization. The Boston-based venture firm was formed in 1978 as a quasi-public corporation by the Legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, governed by an independent Board of Directors, and managed by experienced venture capitalists. Leveraging the entrepreneurial spirit, educated workforce, and centers of innovation in Massachusetts, MassVentures has a track record of success with early-stage ventures.

MassVentures

Atlantic Quantum

Atlantic Quantum develops scalable quantum computers to tackle the world’s hardest computational challenges. Founded in 2022, Atlantic Quantum believes that fault-tolerant quantum hardware is the key to making progress in quantum computing.

Emerging from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2022, Atlantic Quantum develops quantum hardware, leveraging the superconducting qubit fluxonium—as opposed to the commonly used transmon qubits. The use of fluxonium qubits supports the company’s primary focus of building quantum computers with long coherence times (the ability to withstand external disturbances from affecting qubits from falling out of their quantum states), simplifying qubit controls, and reducing errors in quantum processors. Achieving these focus areas would facilitate the use of quantum computers to solve practical real-world problems.

Quantum information processing is slowly becoming a reality, ushering in a new technological era.

Quantum Computing

Riverlane Partners with Atlantic Quantum on Error Correction

Emerging from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2022, Atlantic Quantum develops quantum hardware, leveraging the superconducting qubit fluxonium—as opposed to the commonly used transmon qubits. The use of fluxonium qubits supports the company’s primary focus of building quantum computers with long coherence times (the ability to withstand external disturbances from affecting qubits from falling out of their quantum states), simplifying qubit controls, and reducing errors in quantum processors. Achieving these focus areas would facilitate the use of quantum computers to solve practical real-world problems.In December 2023, the company developed an <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates?companyIds=2115846">open-source software </a>framework for managing and tuning quantum processors. The project was funded by the US Department of Energy.Key customers and partnershipsIn <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/23474">November 2023 </a>, Atlantic Quantum secured a contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and collaborated with several international research institutions, including Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany), the Université de Sherbrooke (Canada), and ETH Zurich (Switzerland), to develop error-corrected quantum computers. In October 2023, the company partnered with <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/23124">SCALINQ </a>to accelerate qubit control, characterization, and measurements on cryogenic hardware.Funding and financialsIn September 2023, Atlantic Quantum secured a <a href="https://www.atlantic-quantum.com/news/atlantic-quantum-wins-air-force-contract-to-build-high-performance-quantum-processor">Direct-to-Phase II contract </a>by AFWERX worth USD 1.25 million. The funds were earmarked for the advancement of fluxonium-based quantum computer hardware that could potentially resolve certain technical challenges within the Department of the Air Force (DAF).

The UK-based Quantum Motion Technologies is engaged in developing quantum computer architectures based on silicon technology, which are compatible with standard silicon processing (CMOS process). The company believes this approach will enable it to create scalable quantum computers with thousands to millions of qubits. The company is working on a technology platform that is not just a qubit, but a scalable array of qubits based on the ubiquitous silicon technology already used in smartphones and computers.Quantum Motion’s goal is to fast-track the development of true fault-tolerant quantum computers and reach a million qubits and beyond by leveraging existing knowledge in device fabrication within the trillion-dollar silicon industry.Key customers and partnershipsIn February 2024, Quantum Motion entered into a project with the <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/26533">National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) </a>to build the UK’s first silicon-based quantum processor test bed in its Oxfordshire site. In November 2023, Quantum Motion partnered with the University of Pennsylvania to further develop its silicon quantum computer chip technology.Funding and financialsThe company raised GBP 42 million (USD 50.5 million) in a <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16504">Series B </a>funding round in February 2023 led by Bosch Ventures (RBVC). The proceeds were allocated for the development of the company’s quantum processors based on silicon technology.

Quantum Motion Technologies

SeeQC is a quantum hardware startup spun out from Hypres, a leading developer of superconductor integrated circuits. SeeQC was developing a digital system-on-a-chip design that integrates classical and quantum circuits into a hybrid system in order to overcome quantum computers’ current challenges. This also reduces noise and interference, maintaining high-fidelity quantum operations at scale. The company owns and operates superconducting flux quantum (SFQ) processors, a chip fabrication facility that enables the creation of multi-chip quantum computing systems and provides foundry services for superconducting devices. It also has facilities in London, UK, and Naples, Italy.Through the hybrid approach, SeeQC believes it can reduce the cost of quantum computers by 1/400th, provide greater control, and reduce energy requirements significantly.Key customers and partnershipsIn September 2023, the company entered into a collaboration with NVIDIA to develop the first all-digital chip-to-chip link between quantum computers and graphics processing units (GPU). SeeQC has also partnered with multinational chemical company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16298">BASF </a>in February 2023 to explore quantum computing in simulating chemical reactions.&nbsp;&nbsp;

SeeQC

IonQ develops general-purpose quantum computers using trapped-ion technology. Although the company calls itself a full-stack player, its focus has been on developing hardware. In December 2020, it revealed its quantum roadmap that introduced its new metric, “algorithmic qubits (AQ),” which represents the largest number of qubits that can be deployed while maintaining high performance and considering error correction. Its latest system IonQ Aria achieved 20 AQ, as of May 2023. In terms of physical qubits, IonQ’s latest hardware had 32 qubits, which were expected to hold 22 AQs. In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/23125">October 2023 </a>, the company achieved 29 algorithmic qubits (AQ) using barium qubits for the first time.Founded in 2015, IonQ’s main competitive advantage stems from its approach to designing qubits that allow computers to be operated at room temperature with lower error rates.&nbsp;IonQ unveiled the industry’s first glass-based trapped ion computing chip called the Reconfigurable Multicore Quantum Architecture (RMQA) technology, in August 2021, which the company believes will significantly expand the longevity of qubits and enable at least triple-digit scalability.&nbsp;In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/31824">July 2024 </a>, the company unveiled an accelerated roadmap with expanded 2025 technical milestones, focused on improving native two-qubit gate performance to over 99.9% (three 9s) in 2025, with further gains expected in 2026 from the transition to barium qubits.Key customers and partnershipsIonQ has entered several strategic partnership including with <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/25925">Rescale </a>(January 2024) to combine their cloud computing and quantum computing capabilities; <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/22265">Air Force Research Lab </a>(September 2023) to deploy two barium-based trapped ion quantum computing systems for quantum networking research and application development in a deal valued at USD 25.5 million; <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/21158">BearingPoint </a>(August 2023) to offer its quantum systems and related professional services to the European market; SoftBank Investment Advisers (June 2021) to provide support in deploying the company’s quantum systems globally; and Accenture (September 2021) to accelerate the industrial application of IonQ’s quantum systems.The company offers access to its quantum computer via all major quantum cloud computing platforms including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Marketplace (GCM). It is also integrated with major software development kits (SDK) including IBM Qiskit and Google Cirq. In May 2023, IonQ began offering its IonQ Aria system on Amazon Braket.

IonQ

<div>
 
 Rigetti is an end-to-end provider of general-purpose quantum computers. The company&rsquo;s approach to developing computers is based on superconducting qubit technology, similar to Google and IBM. Since 2017, the company has operated a cloud-based quantum platform that allows developers to either create applications or use Rigetti&rsquo;s virtual machine.&nbsp;
 
 
 Rigetti is well-positioned to compete with incumbents as well as startups because of its advancements in hardware, which is currently used by 14 other companies (mostly other quantum software startups). Rigetti introduced the world&rsquo;s first multi-chip quantum processor, in June 2021, that physically connects multiple chips with their own qubits in a single functional processor, which is expected to improve scalability. It also launched its first commercially available 80-qubit quantum system in February 2022, which exceeds the qubit count of any other startup, but is lower than that of IBM.&nbsp;
 
 
 In June 2022, the company expanded its geographical presence with the launch of its 32-qubit, cloud-based 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11308">
 Aspen system in the UK
 </a>
 market. It also strengthened its position in the software segment via the acquisition of QxBranch (a Washington-based quantum computing software company) in 2019. In December 2023, the company launched its first 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/24731">
 Quantum Processing Unit (QPU)
 </a>
 , Novera, which is based on its fourth-gen Ankaa-class architecture. The price of the QPU starts from USD 900,000.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 In July 2021, the company partnered with Astex Pharmaceuticals to apply quantum technology to drug discovery. This partnership was a stepping stone for Rigetti to commercially apply quantum computing to the pharmaceutical industry. Additionally, as part of an InnovateUK grant, the company partnered with 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11334">
 Riverlane
 </a>
 in June 2022 to explore and develop error correction solutions. In October 2023, the company was awarded with a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/22419">
 (DARPA) 
 </a>
 contract as part of the Imagining Practical Applications for a Quantum Tomorrow (IMPAQT) program to advance quantum algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems. In January 2024, the company collaborated with 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/25242">
 Moody&rsquo;s Analytics
 </a>
 to enhance machine-learning methods for the financial sector using quantum computing abilities. In February 2024, Rigetti Computing and Riverlane joined a project led by the 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/27062">
 Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
 </a>
 , a part of the US Department of Energy (DOE), to explore the possibility of integrating a quantum computer and high-performance computing (HPC) systems.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 Rigetti 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/8880">
 went public
 </a>
 on Nasdaq under the ticker &ldquo;RGTI,&rdquo; in March 2022 via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger. The IPO raised USD 261.8 million and made Rigetti the second publicly traded pure-play quantum computing company, following IonQ. 
 
</div>

Rigetti Computing

PsiQuantum develops general-purpose quantum computers based on the silicon photonic approach, a relatively new method that is capable of using the existing silicon supply chain of conventional electronics. This will help the company keep production costs low and provide scalability. Its semiconductor roadmap involves interconnecting multiple quantum processor chips with optical fibers and high-performance optical switches to enable teleportation and entanglement of single-photon operations between chips.PsiQuantum's technology uses individual photons, particles of light, as qubits. This approach offers several advantages, including the ability to operate at higher temperatures compared to other qubit technologies, compatibility with fiber-optic networks, and resistance to electromagnetic interference. Additionally, photons can maintain quantum states for relatively long periods, allowing more quantum operations and increased computational power.The company aims to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer with one million physical qubits by the end of 2027, enabling error correction and addressing complex problems across various industries.In <a href="https://www.psiquantum.com/news-import/psiquantum-opens-uk-based-research-facility-to-develop-next-generation-high-power-cryogenic-systems-for-large-scale-quantum-computing">March 2023</a>, PsiQuantum opened an advanced R&amp;D facility at the Daresbury Laboratory in the UK, backed by GBP 9 million from the UK Government's Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology. This facility provides access to one of Europe's largest liquid-helium cryogenic plants, essential for testing PsiQuantum's approach to storing quantum chips at extremely low temperatures.Key customers and partnershipsWorking toward its goal, in May 2021, PsiQuantum entered a partnership with global chip manufacturer <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/2245">GlobalFoundries</a> (GF) to build an integrated, silicon photonics-based quantum system called the “Q1 system” by manufacturing quantum chips in GF’s semiconductor foundry. This partnership also received US federal funding of <a href="https://www.schumer.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/schumer-announces-25-million-for-globalfoundries-and-psiquantum-to-develop-the-next-generation-of-quantum-computers-at-rome-air-force-research-lab-and-malta-campus-fed-funding-will-strengthen-national-security-supercharge-us-technological-competitiveness_ensure-upstate-new-york-continues-to-lead-quantum-technology">USD 25 million</a> in April 2022.&nbsp;In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/13868">October 2022</a>, the company secured a USD 22.5 million contract from the US Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to co-design advanced quantum photonic chips that will be manufactured by GF. The company partnered with Japanese quantum software company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/7246">QunaSys</a> in December 2021 to research quantum-based industrial chemistry and material science solutions and partnered with the UK-based Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/22518">Hartree Centre</a> in October 2023 to develop Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing (FTQC) applications in the UK. In January 2024, PsiQuantum and <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/25972">Mitsubishi UFJ </a>Financial Group (MUFG) entered PsiQuantum's Qlimate initiative project with Mitsubishi Chemical to research energy-efficient materials to promote a low-carbon economy.In May 2023, PsiQuantum received a USD 25 million grant from the US Department of Defense, through the Air Force Research Laboratory, for tooling and further development of its photonic quantum computer.Funding and financialsIn <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/29499">April 2024</a>, the company secured AUD 940 million (USD 620 million) from the Australian Commonwealth and Queensland Governments to establish the first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer in Australia. Notably, PsiQuantum is one of the highest privately funded startup in the industry.

PsiQuantum

Hardware manufacturers for quantum computers or quantum-adjacent products.

Developers of quantum algorithms and software programs for specific industries such as pharmaceuticals or finance.

Full-stack companies offering hardware and software quantum computing solutions.


Companies developing quantum computing hardware using either gate-based or annealing technology.

Developers of quantum system software such as firmware, operating systems, compilers, qubit control software, etc.

Companies offering access to quantum hardware through either their own hardware or through a third party via the cloud.

Startups in this space offer solutions for building enterprise-specific applications and automations

ANALYST_QUICK_TAKE

PROMINENT_CATEGORY

<div>
 
 Quantum error correction technology company, Riverlane, and quantum computers developer, Atlantic Quantum, have partnered to work on quantum error correction. The collaboration aims to enhance quantum error correction techniques and quicken the path towards achieving quantum advantage, which allows for sustained quantum computation and useful applications.
 
</div> Analyst QuickTake : 
 This partnership follows Riverlane’s partnership with <a href="https: 
//sp-edge.com/updates/29851"> Alice &amp; Bob </a> in May 2024, which focused on integrating the company’s error correction technology with the latter’s cat qubit-based quantum computing system. With error correction being one of the most important focuses of quantum computing startups, Riverlane is exploring the potential of its technology with various systems—cat qubits and superconducting fluxonium-based qubits.&nbsp;

Atlantic Quantum

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