Haiqu, a quantum software company, has raised £8 million in a seed round led by Primary Venture Partners, with participation from Qudit Investments led by John Donovan, Alumni Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Silicon Roundabout Ventures, Angel One Fund, and returning investors Toyota Ventures and Mac Venture Capital. Haiqu develops software designed to run near-term quantum applications at significantly lower computational cost. The funding will be used to accelerate the launch of Haiqu’s operating system for quantum applications.
The raise supports Haiqu’s efforts to address the high cost and limited performance of today’s quantum hardware, which it says restricts experimentation and progress. By reducing the resources required to run applications, Haiqu aims to make empirical testing and development more feasible for quantum teams.
Founded in 2022, Haiqu builds a hardware-aware quantum software stack that is designed to overcome limitations of modern quantum systems. Its software focuses on enabling larger and more complex applications to run with fewer resources, helping teams make practical use of existing quantum hardware rather than waiting for fully fault-tolerant systems.
Haiqu has already worked on anomaly detection use cases that were affirmed by IBM and Bank of Montreal, and plans to continue validating near-term quantum applications across industries including finance, healthcare, aviation and life sciences. Haiqu is also running quantum machine learning workloads at scale over high-dimensional data, according to the company.
Alongside product development, Haiqu plans to expand its global team and has recently hired Antonio Mei, formerly a principal technical product manager at Microsoft Quantum, as lead product manager to oversee the launch of its operating system. It will also continue to develop and support its early access programme for researchers.
