Haiqu Raises $4M in Pre-Seed Funding to Increase Adoption of Short-Term Quantum Computing

Insider Summary

• Haiqu announced it has closed a $4 million financing round led by Mac Venture Capital.
• Toyota Ventures, SOMA capital, u.ventures, SID Venture Partners and Roosh Ventures also participated in the round.
• Haiqu builds software to improve the performance of quantum processors.
• Images provided: Haiqu leadership team Mykola Maksymenko (CTO) and Richard Givan (CEO).

PRESS RELEASE — Haiqu, a startup building software to enhance quantum processor performance, today announced it has completed a $4 million financing round led by MaC Venture Capital, with participation from Toyota Ventures, SOMA capital, u.ventures, SID Venture Partners, and Roosh Ventures. The round also included personal contributions from Paul Holland, Alexi Kirilenko and Gordy Holterman.

“We are accelerating the timeline for practical quantum computing by developing new software that can extract value from clunky short-term quantum hardware, enabling quantum applications that were previously impossible.” said Richard Givhan, co-founder and CEO at Haiqu. “We are proud to be supported by investors with an outstanding deep technology ecosystem and a track record of supporting the commercialization of breakthrough technologies. “

The investment will fuel the company’s research and development efforts as well as the formation of strategic partnerships to bring their products to market.

“MaC is excited to be supporting Haiqu through this next stage of growth.” said Adrian Fenty, Managing General Partner at Mac Venture Capital. “We firmly believe that the future of quantum computing will fundamentally change the way we can solve meaningful problems. We strongly believe that Richard and Mykola are uniquely positioned to address these issues in order to accelerate the timeline that will allow Quantum to gain widespread commercial adoption.”

“We’ve been eyeing the quantum computing space for years, but the hardware and hype kept us from watching,” said Jim Adler, founder and general partner at Toyota Ventures. “Haiqu caught our attention with their optimization software that enhances quantum hardware to solve practical industrial problems. We are excited to support the Haiqu team as they overcome this challenging and exciting frontier.”

The startup was formed and incubated in the fall of 2022 in the Creative Destruction Lab Quantum stream in Toronto by Richard Givhan (CEO), a Stanford alum and former EIR at Mitsubishi Electric, and Mykola Maksymenko (CTO), a former researcher at the Max Planck Society and the Weizmann Institute of Science and head of R&D at global consultancy SoftServe Inc.

Haiqu discusses a fundamental obstacle standing in the way of adoption of quantum applications: the limited number of qubits and the high noise sensitivity of short-term quantum processors. The startup develops platform-agnostic technologies that extend the capabilities of quantum hardware by an order of magnitude and enable a wider set of practical use cases in finance, chemistry, life sciences, mobility and other domains.

“We are leveraging our expertise in quantum complexity, AI and high-performance computing to create products that we believe can streamline entire industries.” says Mykola Maksymenko, co-founder and CTO at Haiqu. ”With prior experience building and scaling deep technology R&D in large enterprises, we appreciate the challenge of bringing complex technologies to market. We are eager to get our technology into users’ hands as soon as possible.”

Starting as a remote collaboration of the founders, Haiqu is growing globally through distributed teams spanning the United States, Ukraine, Canada, Germany and Switzerland. Given the dearth of quantum talent, this gives startups access to some of the world’s leading talent pools in quantum and software engineering.