Quantum News Briefs June 26: ORCA Computing leads R&D consortium to pioneer quantum networking multiplexing technologies • Zapata AI & KPMG UK successfully collaborate on risk & operational modeling for leading global insurance firm • Foresight leads £2.2 million growth capital investment into disruptive cyber technology start-up Cavero Quantum •Haiqu releases open-Source Rivet for quantum workflow execution

News Briefs:

ORCA Computing leads R&D consortium to pioneer quantum networking multiplexing technologies

ORCA Computing, a leading quantum computing company, has announced it is spearheading a collaborative R&D consortium to develop market changing multiplexing technologies to advance quantum networking for use in quantum computing and data centers as per news release June 25. In collaboration with other top quantum experts, including Toshiba Europe, Ltd., Bay Photonics, Ltd., Imperial College London, and University College London, the consortium will develop advanced multiplexing and switching technologies for large-scale quantum data transfer to scale quantum computing to levels necessary for commercial application.
The project sets the stage for a significant advancement in quantum networking capabilities, with broad implications for high performance computing and cloud data centers. For the first time ever, a suite of technologies will be delivered and operated in tandem: quantum memories, frequency shifters, and spatial switches.  This will allow the networking that takes place within and between quantum computers to exponentially scale to performance levels necessary for industrial scale quantum computing and networking.

Zapata AI & KPMG UK successfully collaborate on risk & operational modeling for leading global insurance firm

Zapata Computing Holdings Inc. (“Zapata AI”) (Nasdaq: ZPTA), the Industrial Generative AI company, and KPMG UK, a leading audit, tax, and advisory services firm, recently completed a successful client project to streamline the compliance models of a leading global insurance firm.
The project aimed to transform the client’s risk, operations, and compliance modeling by leveraging Zapata’s cutting-edge analytics, optimization, and generative AI capabilities.KPMG’s actuaries, working with Zapata’s data engineers, converted one of the client’s compliance models, comprised of tens of millions of inputs, and built an optimized solution with innovative algorithms.
This new approach reduced the compute time it would have taken for these models by more than 1,000x, while maintaining accuracy and enabling the client to meet compliance requirements. Previously, the client had been submitting approximations instead of actual finished calculations. 

Foresight leads £2.2 million growth capital investment into disruptive cyber technology start-up Cavero Quantum

Foresight Group, the leading listed infrastructure and regional private equity investment manager, has led a £2.2 million growth capital investment into Cavero Quantum Ltd  alongside co-investor, Northern Gritstone.
Cavero Quantum, a University of Leeds spinout, has developed a new passwordless encryption technology for secure key generation and authentication. It is compatible with legacy hardware, requires little bandwidth and has the potential to be potentially secure against cyber attacks by quantum computers.
The technology is attractive to a wide range of sectors and has immediate market application through replacing multi-factor authentication and one-time passwords with a high security, frictionless, passwordless form of authentication.
Founded by Professor Ben Varcoe and Dr Frey Wilson, Cavero Quantum will use the funding to begin commercialising its technology and launch its first product.  As part of the investment, the founders will be supported by the appointment of James Trenholme, as CEO, and Andrew Wallace as Chair.

Haiqu, a quantum computing startup, announced the release of its new open-source toolkit – Rivet on June 24. This new toolkit is made to help developers streamline the execution of a diverse set of modern quantum workflows, such as error mitigation and quantum machine learning.
This announcement follows the company’s successful $4 million pre-seed funding round last year, which was led by MaC Venture Capital with participation from Toyota Ventures and other notable investors.
Rivet helps developers overcome bottlenecks in transpilation – a key preparatory step before the execution of an algorithm on quantum hardware, which often takes a significant portion of execution time. With Rivet, the transpilation time for typical applications can go from many hours to just a few minutes.