Horizon Quantum Holdings Ltd. Class A Ordinary Shares Canaccord Genuity's 46th Annual Growth Conference

Sure. I have been working in quantum computing quite a long time now. I got into the field back in 2004 when I thought quantum computers were just around the corner, which shows a little bit of youthful naivety. But, I have been working in the field since then. I did my PhD at Oxford. I worked as a fellow in Merton, doing research into quantum computing and applications of quantum computing, as well as architectures, like how you build a scalable system that is error-corrected and so on. I have been working on that for many years. I moved over to Singapore in 2010, built up a research group over there.

But around 2015, 2016, with the release of the IBM Quantum Experience, when they put the first. I was about to say when they put the first quantum computer on the cloud, but actually University of Bristol had a linear optic system that they put on the internet just before then. Two systems went online pretty soon, or close together around that time. You also had a lot of results where the error rates were getting much better. Around the time I got into quantum computing, the chance of you having an error, if you tried to do a logic gate in a quantum computer, was about 3 in 10. Zero nines of fidelity. It had increased to the point where it was maybe 1 in 100.

That was really interesting because it was close to where we thought error correction might become a possibility. Now it has taken a bit longer, and it turns out that systems have had to become a little bit better than was expected in order to really see error correction start to work. But around that time, it was becoming increasingly clear that progress was going to be made more in industry than it was in academia. Maybe this is something like the current situation with AI, where all of the frontier labs are now in industry. The same is true of quantum computing. Pretty much all of the frontier systems, nearly all of the frontier systems, are built in industry rather than academia. I decided it was time to jump ship and move into industry.

I went out, started interviewing at a bunch of quantum computing companies, then decided that I did not really agree with anyone's view of what was needed. I better go do it myself. In 2018, I registered the company on paper, went out to raise some money, and quit my academic job. I think I was the first person with a tenured professorship to actually quit to move into a quantum computing startup. What we have been focused on is really closing what we see as one of the really fundamental gaps in quantum computing. A really important part of quantum computing is, can you build hardware that can process information quantum mechanically? That is what many of the companies you will hear from today do. It is what IQM do, it is what many others do. There is another part of that.

How do you harness these systems to do useful work? The reality is they work in a fundamentally different way than conventional computers. Taking code written for conventional computers and trying to run it on a quantum computer does not help you at all. Instead, we need to reinvent essentially 80 years of computer science, 80 years of computer software, for the quantum era. That is what we have been trying to do at Horizon. We have been trying to speed run the history of computer software or computer software engineering from the 1940s, 1950s, up to the present day. We have been doing that by building programming languages to make the systems more accessible, to expose more capabilities. We have been building the compilers and the runtime environment to be able to execute that on hardware.

As we have started to do that, we have started to have to develop essentially system software as well. At the moment, most quantum programs that are run today are what are called circuits. That is just a list of operations, one after the next, that are implemented and then finished with measurements. If you want to do general computation, you need to think of general control flow. You need to be able to do things like loops and subroutine calls and things like this. That is trivial on conventional computers. It is how they all work. In quantum computing, we are only just at the forefront of that. As we are just dipping into that in quantum computing, it opens up the whole domain of operating systems. Not the way many of the companies you will hear from use the term operating system, where they are talking about orchestrating workloads.

What I mean is fundamentally the kernel that runs on your laptop, on your server, that is exposing different system services, dynamic memory allocation, input and output, so communications with other systems over network. All of these kind of low-level operations that are needed during the execution of complex programs. We have started having to build into that direction. Essentially now we have become the first software company to start operating our own hardware. We have a first testbed system that is pieced together from a Rigetti QPU and control systems from Quantum Machines. We have a new system coming next year from IonQ that will be a very capable system. We are looking forward to getting our hands on that.

There's different levels at which things are different. I should say it's fundamentally different from most methods of programming quantum computers. The first thing that's important to understand is that the programming languages we build target ideal quantum computers. So we say, "What does a perfect quantum computer look like?" Not the systems we have today, but what does a perfect ideal quantum computer look like, and how do we program that system? Then what we need to do is build up the compiler capabilities, the execution capabilities to take that code written for an ideal system and execute it on the kinds of more limited systems that we have available today. That's important to understand because many of the systems that are currently available are not capable of doing things like control flow.

They can't do something as simple as making a measurement in the middle of a computation and then using the result of that to decide what happens next. Some can, but there's a lot of constraints around this. If you think about what a mature quantum computer should be able to do, first of all, it needs to be able to make a general decision based on any measurements that it has at that point in time. So that means you need to be able to do classical computation on the results of measurements from a quantum computation, and then use them to influence that ongoing quantum computation before it has all collapsed, before the quantumness has been washed out by decoherence.

So we have been building an execution environment that enables this, and necessarily, this allows you to express things in our programming languages that are just not expressible in many other programming frameworks for quantum computers. Now, that's true of all of our programming languages, from Hydrogen, which you can think of as an assembly language, through Helium, which is essentially a basic programming language, to Beryllium, which is our first object-oriented programming language. The reason we have built up these layers of abstraction up to an object-oriented quantum programming language is so that you can start to abstract away the quantumness. Essentially, what we're trying to do as a company is get to a point where developers can write conventional code and have it automatically accelerated on quantum computers. Beryllium is essentially the third step of four for us on this path.

What we're doing with that is allowing developers who are expert in quantum computing to build up classes to represent objects that are combinations of quantum and classical data, together with the various algorithms to manipulate those kinds of data. But then to allow those to be exposed to other developers who may not be experts in quantum computing. So it allows you to add this layer of abstraction where each incremental developer can create higher levels of abstraction and start removing the quantum mechanics. It starts to get you to a place where developers can write code that is able to express anything a quantum computer can possibly do, but in such a way that they don't need to be experts in quantum computing themselves. I think that's really important.