Quantum software company Riverlane secures £15m in Series B fundraise

Quantum engineering company Riverlane has raised £15million in a Series B funding round led by Molten Ventures and including participation from AI leader Altair and returning investors Cambridge Innovation Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners and the National Security Strategic Investment Fund.

Altair’s CEO and founder, James R Scapa, will sit on the Riverlane board.

The new investment substantially increases Riverlane’s enterprise valuation and is expected to see the company through to cash flow break-even.

The additional capital will be used to accelerate the development of Riverlane’s operating system for error-corrected quantum computing, Deltaflow.OS.

Error correction is the defining technical challenge for quantum computing to achieve the scale and reliability to deliver its transformative potential. Riverlane is already partnering with many of the world’s leading quantum hardware companies, university labs and government agencies to build and implement Deltaflow.OS with various qubit types.

These partners include the University of Wisconsin, Duke University, the University of Oxford and the University of Innsbruck, and over a third of the world’s quantum hardware companies, such as Infleqtion, Qolab, Quera, Seeqc, Rigetti and Universal Quantum.

The quantum computing industry is forecast to create up to $850bn in economic value in the next 15-30 years. To deliver transformational new applications in fields such as drug design, material science, aerospace and climate change, quantum computers will need to reliably perform a trillion high-speed operations without disruption.

However, today’s quantum computers can still only perform a maximum of a few hundred quantum operations before failure. This is due to the high error rate caused by the delicate nature of all types of qubits. For quantum computers to become useful, it is critical to find a way to detect, diagnose, and correct quantum errors as they occur, so they can be scaled from a few hundred error-free quantum operations (QuOps) today to a trillion (TeraQuOps). This is the number of operations required to execute most known quantum algorithms.

To address the TeraQuOp challenge, Riverlane is designing qubit ‘Control’ and error ‘Decoding‘ hardware and software. ‘Control’ and ‘Decode’ are key components of Riverlane’s quantum operating system, Deltaflow.OS.

Riverlane founder and CEO Steve Brierley said: “Solving quantum error correction — one of the defining scientific challenges of our times — will enable quantum computers to accurately simulate the true complexity of nature. Armed with useful quantum computers, humans will enter the Quantum Age, where we go from slow trial and error to solve complex problems to an era of rapid design using quantum computers.

“We haven’t even begun to imagine the many ways such technology will positively transform our world.”