Riverlane lands $18.7M in funding from Molten, Altair, others
Riverlane, one of the first quantum computing companies to emerge in the U.K. back in 2016, well before the region became a hotbed of quantum activity, announced that it has raised £15 million (about $18.7 million USD) in a Series B funding round.
The round was led by Molten Ventures, but another intriguing participant in the round was high-performance computing (HPC) and AI firm Altair, which has been exploring the intersection of quantum and HPC. Altair CEO and founder James R. Scapa will join the Riverlane board.
Other returning investors included Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), Amadeus Capital Partners, and the National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF).
Riverlane said the new investment, which will be used to accelerate the development of Riverlane’s Deltaflow.OS operating system for error-corrected quantum computing, substantially increases Riverlane’s enterprise valuation and is expected to see the company through to cash flow break-even.
One of many companies working on ways to improve error correction in quantum computers, Riverlane made several key advances in recent years, which eventually helped it earn a contract with the U.K.’s National Quantum Computing Centre in 2021.
The company said in a statement that it is working to advance quantum computers from being capable of a “few hundred error-free quantum operations (QuOps) today to a trillion (TeraQuOps),” the number of operations it said is required to execute most known quantum algorithms. The key components of its Deltaflow.OS qubit “Control” and error “Decoding” hardware and software. By the end of 2025, Riverlane will develop its Decode solution into a chip-based TeraQuOp decoder that can process up to 100TB of data per second, the company said.
Among the quotes from investors in Riverlane’s press release announcing the funding, Scapa stated, “Riverlane’s ground-breaking technology provides a critical common software platform, including error correction across all quantum hardware architectures to accelerate the impact and scale of quantum computing. Altair has a long history of creating and investing in HPC technologies. Collaborating with Riverlane allows Altair to stay ahead of the curve of transformative technologies to help our customers fast-track their innovation.”
Dan O’Shea has covered telecommunications and related topics including semiconductors, sensors, retail systems, digital payments and quantum computing/technology for over 25 years.
