Quantum computing company, D-Wave Systems, has raised $30 million

D-Wave Systems, the controversial poster child of commercial quantum computing, has raised $30 million in venture capital from Fidelity Canada Fund, Goldman Sachs, Business Development Bank of Canada and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company, which is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, has now raised $160 million since it was founded in 1999. Although debate over the quantum properties of D-Wave’s system remains an ongoing affair, researchers do seem generally excited about the types of problems D-Wave’s computer might be able to solve given the right algorithms. And regardless if it’s ultimately determined to be a true quantum computer, D-Wave is still an interesting company to watch. The company is already working with partners in the financial services and life sciences spaces to apply the D-Wave computer to their problems, and it’s promising to deliver its infrastructure as a cloud computing service to maximize its reach. Lockheed Martin, Google and NASA are the only publicly known owners of D-Wave computers today.

Quantum computing technology company D-Wave Systems has raised a new $28.4 million round of funding, according to a new filing on the SEC’s site. This latest round, the largest since a $30 million round in October 2012, brings the company’s total funding to approximately $160 million. Investments in the round came from new and existing investors include Fidelity Canada Fund, Goldman Sachs, Draper Fisher Jurveston, and the Business Development Bank of Canada. This comes weeks after a recent controversy regarding whether or not the company’s quantum computers — employed by the likes of Lockheed Martin, Google, and NASA — actually offer “quantum speedup,” solving problems faster than a traditional computer. Here’s how Scientific American’s Seth Fletcher summarized the study that started the controversy: “The first thing to know about the D-Wave Two is that it is not a general quantum computer—it’s what is called a quantum annealer, which should, in theory, be capable of solving certain types of optimization and sorting problems exponentially faster than a classical computer. To test it, the authors of the Science paper tested 1,000 randomly chosen cost-function problems on both the D-Wave Two and a classical annealer. They found that, overall, the D-Wave did not exhibit quantum speedup on the set of problems used. The group phrased its findings very diplomatically. “This does not mean the device cannot have quantum speedup,” lead author Matthias Troyer says. “It just means that in the tests we conducted, [quantum speedup] was not there.”