Nord Quantique, a Sherbrooke (Canada) based quantum computing technology start-up, today announced it has closed CAD $9.5 Million seed funding co-led by Quantonation and BDC Capital’s Deep Tech Venture Fundand joined by Real Ventures.

Quantum information is fragile. One of the main challenges in quantum hardware is to isolate as much as possible the system from the environment while preserving a high degree of control. This calls for more robust ways to encode, protect, process, and retrieve quantum information.  Nord Quantique is developing bosonic codes implemented with superconducting circuits, including so called Schrödinger-cat codes, GKP codes and a whole zoology of approaches (see below for further references). Bosonic systems (microwave photons in cavities) naturally provide a richer encoding space, making it a lot easier to prevent noisy interactions to impact the system and produce errors, thus preserving quantum information. Superconducting circuits provide a complete toolbox for engineering high-performance bosonic codes. Nord Quantique’s technology, on the hardware and the software side, provides a credible pathway to Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing.

Quantonation has been on board with Nord Quantique since day one of its inception in 2020 through financing of its pre-seed round together with Real Ventures. The new round sanctions the progress achieved from the concept phase to implementation in a first generation of chips, and will help the company further develop its technology, grow and achieve exciting milestones. 

Beyond technology, Nord Quantique has been ideally positioned to leverage the outstanding Sherbrooke Quantum Ecosystem. Nord Quantique is a partner of the Sherbrooke Quantum Innovation Zone, dedicated toadvancing quantum computing innovation in Québec and recently announced by the Prime Minister with more than CAD $100m in dedicated funding.

“With the support of Profs. Alexandre Blais, Scientific Director of the Institut quantique at University of Sherbrooke, and Michel Pioro-Ladrière, Deputy Director at Institut quantique sitting on the Nord Quantique scientific advisory board, we have full confidence in the vision and capabilities of this team and their impact on the future of quantum computing,” said Christophe Jurczak, Managing Partner at Quantonation, already a Board Member at Nord Quantique.

To know more about the technology:

The superconducting qubits landscape, an overview (MIT, Chalmers):

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-conmatphys-031119-050605

The superconducting qubits landscape, in depth co-authored by Prof. Alexandre Blais, Nord Quantique’s co-founder at university of Sherbrooke: 

https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.93.025005

Encoding qubits in microwave photons through bosonic codes, an introduction:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667325820300145