Xanadu

Xanadu is a Canadian end-to-end provider of quantum solutions and is the world’s first quantum computing company to prove the viability of the photonic approach. Quantum computers built using this approach can operate at room temperature and are easier to scale as they use existing fiber-optic-based telecommunication infrastructure. The company achieved quantum computational advantage in June 2022 when it unveiled a new photonic quantum computer, “Borealis,” with 216 squeezed-state qubits. Borealis is publicly available on the cloud.

The company provides cloud access to its quantum processors consisting of 8, 12, and 24 qubits (yet to launch) configurations. It also operates cloud-based platforms for its software products —PennyLane (for quantum machine learning) and Strawberry Fields (for photonic algorithms). Xanadu says that its in-house team of dedicated scientists is globally recognized in quantum machine learning.

The company has received two grants (amounts undisclosed) from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The first was in November 2019 to undertake a comprehensive investigation of the performance of quantum machine-learning algorithms on available quantum computing hardware, and then in July 2021 to develop a novel general-purpose "circuit-cutting" compiler for near-term quantum computers.

Key customers and partnerships

Xanadu partnered with various organizations, which included

1) South Carolina Quantum (SC Quantum) (April 2024) to develop quantum educational materials and promote a quantum-based workforce in South Carolina

2) Riverlane and Rolls-Royce (March 2024) to leverage quantum computing for modeling airflow in jet engines

3) Volkswagen (October 2022) to develop materials for electric vehicle (EV) batteries

4) Multiverse Computing (February 2022) and Agnostiq (November 2021) to build quantum finance solutions

5) GlobalFoundries (March 2022) and IMEC (August 2021) for photonic chip fabrication 

6) Quantum Algorithms Institute (March 2022) to build a quantum-ready workforce

7) Menten AI (January 2022), a quantum biotech company, to design novel drug molecules

Funding and financials

In February 2024, Xanadu secured repayable funding of CAD 3.75 million (USD 2.78 million) from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) via the Regional Quantum Initiative (RQI). The proceeds were earmarked to accelerate the development of Xanadu’s open-source software framework PennyLane.