Palo Alto quantum computing startup scores $215M to take on Google, IBM

If it fulfills that prediction, it would be a major step in producing a general-purpose quantum computer that could be broadly useful to businesses.

“If they are really able to pull this off, it immediately distinguishes them and puts them in a completely different field so far ahead of the competition,” Peter Rohde, a Future Fellow at the Centre for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney, told Bloomberg.

CEO O'Brien and co-founders Terry Rudolph, Mark Thompson and Pete Shadbolt are Australian and British academics who formed PsiQuantum in Silicon Valley to develop a computer that essentially runs on light.

They have assembled a team of more than 100 to build what is known as a silicon photonic quantum computer.

Samir Kumar, general manager of Microsoft Corp.’s venture capital unit who has invested in PsiQuantum, put in perspective what the company says its machine will be able to do: “By the time you get to 80 qubits, you are in a place where the qubits are storing more information than the total number of atoms in the entire universe."

Google last year demonstrated a 54-qubit machine that did a calculation in three minutes that would take a traditional supercomputer 10,000 years. But that one was built to specifically do well on that particular calculation, not a broad set of jobs.

Atomico led the new funding, joined by BlackRock, Founders Fund and Redpoint Ventures.

In addition to Microsoft, other previous investors in PsiQuantum include The House Fund and Playground Global.