Terra Quantum extends Series A round to reap $75M
It has been barely two months since Swiss start-up Terra Quantum AG announced a $60 million Series A funding round, and this week the company said it extended that round with the inclusion of new investors to bring its total money raised to $75 million.
That is among the largest funding rounds for a quantum start-up, perhaps not too surprising considering the deep educational and professional finance background of Terra Quantum founder and CEO Markus Pflitsch, who shared some of that background and his visions for the company on a recent IQT Quantum Tech Pod episode.
Terra Quantum said the new funds will go toward strengthening its offering around data cryptography and cybersecurity. It has been pursuing a quantum-as-a service business model, among other efforts.
The company has been pursuing research into ferroelectric materials to develop efficient power devices for nanoelectronics. Terra Quantum claims to be the first company to reveal the underlying mechanism of ferroelectric-based negative capacitance while also sharing methods for its practical realization,” the company said in its funding announcement. The statement went on to say that Terra Quantum has demonstrated an effect that runs counter to one of the fundamental laws of electricity – that “the bigger electric charge one places on a conductor, the larger electric field this conductor produces around itself.”
The statement also explained in great detail what this might mean for quantum:
“Critical to the development of quantum computers and quantum communications is overcoming the bottlenecks of conventional binary von Neumann architectures. This must be done by exploiting features of the neuroscience principles of biological brains. Building on the discovery of ferroelectric logical units capable of operating within the framework of multi-bit logic, which contrasts with the binary logic of standard computational units, Terra Quantum will implement neuromorphic spiking neural networks. The future central element of this direction is the representation of the quantum neuro-principles of the human brain, whose incredible efficiency results from the spontaneous formation of quantum spikes that synchronize constitutive qubits. These temporal spikes provide quantum jumps called ‘enlightenment’, which is the main effect of the human brain that distinguishes it from computers. Using the neuromorphic multi-bit logic of ferroelectric units as a model for qubits, Terra Quantum will provide the hybrid neuromorphic NISQ environment for qubits and reveal the topological architectures that enable the formation of the qubit quantum spikes. This puts in reach emerging technologies as efficient as the human brain.”
Valerii Vinokur, CTO of Terra Quantum, added, “Our research is another giant leap towards ushering in the next generation of technology. Harnessing negative capacitors and leveraging them in electronic circuits paves the way for a new generation of transistors and optoelectronic resonators. These serve as the foundation of key technologies such as computer chips that power everything from cars to medical equipment.”
Dan O’Shea has covered telecommunications and related topics including semiconductors, sensors, retail systems, digital payments and quantum computing/technology for over 25 years.
