Horizon Quantum Holdings Ltd. Class A Ordinary Shares Canaccord Genuity's 46th Annual Growth Conference
Review the key takeaways and the transcript of this earnings call.
- Horizon Quantum completed its second quarter as a public company and expanded its test bed with a superconducting system assembled from Rigetti QPU and Quantum Machines control systems.
- The company has developed a software stack including programming languages (Hydrogen, Helium, Beryllium), compilers, and runtime environments to enable general quantum computation with control flow, loops, and subroutine calls, which are not widely supported by current quantum hardware.
- Horizon Quantum operates its own hardware testbed on-premises in Singapore, allowing deep integration with control systems and low-latency classical processing essential for concurrent quantum-classical computation.
- The company is collaborating with IonQ to deploy a 256-qubit trapped ion system in Dublin, Ireland, expected next year, which may approach quantum advantage for certain chemistry problems.
- Horizon Quantum emphasizes that current quantum computers are not yet producing real value in production environments and that a step change is needed in both hardware and software to achieve quantum advantage.
- The company has an internal applications team focused on three high-value problems across different industries to drive progress toward practical quantum advantage.
- Horizon Quantum remains pre-revenue, deliberately avoiding early revenue from professional services that do not represent true quantum advantage.
- The company maintains tight control on operating expenses while pursuing a roadmap inspired by Microsoft's evolution from programming languages to system software and applications.
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Transcript
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I am Kingsley Crane, a technology analyst here. I have had the privilege of getting to know the Horizon Quantum team a little bit better over the past couple of months. We have Dr. Joe Fitzsimons, CEO and founder, here with us today. Welcome back. You joined our symposium in May. A lot has happened since then. You have a Quantum Machines collaboration, a testbed expansion, your second quarter as a public company. Just, I guess, for those that have not met you co-invented universal blind quantum computing, before founding Horizon in 2018. Maybe if you just start out with what you saw in your research and maybe the gap you saw in the market that led you to founding Horizon.
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.
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