Ground State Ventures

We’re proud to announce we’ve led a $2.2 million pre-seed round in RhymeQ, a startup that makes programming quantum computers as simple as writing in Python.

Quantum computers promise to solve significant problems and expand the reach of supercomputing and AI, for instance in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, finance, or manufacturing.

… but coding for a quantum computer currently requires a PhD in quantum physics - a severe limitation.

RhymeQ has developed Rhyme, a new abstraction layer that allows every developer with basic Python skills to code for quantum. The actual coding is familiar and conventional, while the company’s compilers handle the translation for quantum computers. What’s more, it’s compatible across multiple quantum processors, with no hardware lock-in.

Germany and Switzerland based RhymeQ was founded by serial quantum entrepreneur Daniel Volz, CTO Tamás Varga and COO Christina Wu.

RhymeQ comes out of stealth today at NVIDIA GTC Berlin, where Daniel will unveil Rhyme at the NVIDIA Inception startup pitch session. RhymeQ is a member of NVIDIA Inception, NVIDIA's program for cutting-edge startups.

Rhyme compiles directly to the NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform, so the same code runs on GPU-accelerated quantum simulators and on real quantum processors from a range of hardware providers.

As our partner Kris Kaczmarek says: “While the gap between quantum algorithms and hardware is closing fast, we keep hearing ‘who cares if no one knows how to use them’. This is the gap RhymeQ is closing. And there's no one who understands this better than Daniel Volz, who's seen both sides of the equation, whether it was implementing quantum for chemistry at BASF or providing quantum solutions at Kipu Quantum.”

From today, the first developers on the RhymeQ waitlist get free access to the Rhyme compiler and the Rhyme developer community, with further invitations rolling out in the coming weeks.

Sign up at rhymeq.com

Today we’re proud to announce we have led a $1 million pre-seed round in EMode Photonix.

The Boulder, Colorado-based company delivers powerful simulation tools to allow novel photonics technologies for quantum computers to be developed faster.

Integrated photonics is one of the fastest growing and most exciting areas of technology currently. Traditionally developed for telecommunications, it is finding increasing use in sensing, computing (see NVIDIA investing billions in partnerships with photonics companies to replace copper wire) and especially quantum technologies.

Traditionally, photonics engineers could rely on existing simulations of linear photonics, which is sufficient for simple light routing circuits. However, the next generation of photonic devices exploit non-linear photonics, which not only allows one to bridge and generate different frequencies of light, but even enables the conversion of classical to quantum light.

Up until now, there haven’t been any efficient tools for simulating non-linear photonics. EMode Photonix has developed a unique simulation stack, based on proprietary computational techniques that speeds up the simulation of non-linear photonic circuits by 1,000x.

EMode was co-founded by Eric and Maiya Stanton. Eric previously researched photonics at UC Santa Barbara, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Colorado Boulder.

Based in Boulder, within a stone’s throw of the R&D facilities of several major quantum computing companies, they are in prime position to fuel the development of new quantum infrastructure.

Having successfully commercialized its software for use in research labs, the company is now preparing an enterprise offering that will allow complete photonic integrated circuit design in a single day, to support the burgeoning market for quantum computer development.

As our partner Kris Kaczmarek says:

“EMode Photonix is well positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for photonics tooling required by quantum computing companies, regardless of the modality they use. With a truly unique approach to their product that supports a much larger variety of devices and materials than existing alternatives, we’re proud to back Eric, Maiya, and their team as they bring their software to the enterprise market.”

We’re very pleased to welcome @AzuleneLabs to our portfolio as it announces we have led its $3.4 million pre-seed round.

Azulene Labs is creating the future of drug and materials development. While mechanical and civil engineers design new products with high-precision software, chemistry has traditionally been far less precise.

For example, even after 60 years of computer modeling, predictions of how tightly a drug sticks to its target protein are still routinely wrong by a factor of a hundred or more.

Azulene Labs is rebuilding the simulation stack to make chemistry and biochemistry modeling truly predictive for the first time. It is building high-accuracy physics-based foundation models that provide around 100 times the efficiency of competitors while being at least 200 times more cost-effective.

Co-founder @NicolasSawaya explains: “An airplane is specified down to manufacturing tolerances before anyone builds a prototype. A skyscraper is load-tested in simulation before a single beam goes up. These ‘macroscopic’ models are so accurate that you can put enormous trust in them. Chemistry has had nothing like this. Until now.”

“Chemistry should work the way aerospace engineering already works, where you design the thing in a computer, you believe the answer, and the physical object behaves as predicted the first time you build it.”

Azulene Labs uses quantum-mechanical training data that produces far more high-quality data and higher-accuracy AI models for the same amount of capital as other approaches.

While there have been significant advances in AI-based chemistry modeling in recent years, existing models routinely produce structures that are deeply inaccurate, or worse, physically impossible. Azulene Labs’ models are constrained to the laws of physics in ways that the current cutting-edge AI models are not.

The technology can make a significant impact on product development across pharma, agriculture, energy storage, plastics, and industrial chemicals.

“Imagine cancer medicines aimed at proteins the industry wrote off as undruggable decades ago; new antibiotics for infections that have stopped responding to everything we have; replacements for the solvents the chemical industry runs on by the megaton, many of which are toxic enough that regulators are phasing them out with no good substitute yet found, or plastics that perform like the ones we use today but break down completely afterward instead of persisting for centuries,” Sawaya says.

The new funds will be spent on expanding the team and further product development. The company is currently working with end-users in the biotech and industrial chemistry markets.

@noordende, our founder and General Partner, says:

“What we see in this company is exceptional founder-market fit at a time when the pharma market is hungry for exactly what this incredible team is building. Nicolas is the perfect person to lead Azulene Labs to become the Anthropic of chemistry.”

Introducing the latest addition to our portfolio! We’ve led a $1.4 million pre-seed round for Arq Quantum Technologies.

Arq is accelerating the development of the quantum internet with a quantum repeater that achieves connectivity reliably across long distances, faster and at lower cost than alternative approaches.

Co-founders Samuele Grandi and Emanuele Distante are both experienced quantum scientists, and this latest advancement builds on their previous breakthroughs such as the first multiplexed and telecom-compatible quantum repeater, the first transmission of light-matter entanglement over tens of kilometers of optical fibre over a metropolitan network, and a quantum gate between remote atoms in optical cavities.

They’re targeting the launch of a commercial product for networking quantum computers over long distances, aiming at telecom, finance, pharma, and healthcare customers.

This round will fund a state-of-the-art lab to develop Arq's next generation of quantum memory devices, with a focus on reproducibility and reliability.

Want to know more? Here’s Samuele to tell you all about Arq…

When we hosted Ground State Assembly in Amsterdam recently, @BNR knew it was a great opportunity to tell their listeners about the huge opportunity quantum technology presents.

And so @joevanburik and @ikbenechtben took time to interview our founder and general partner @noordende , our partner @ChadRigetti, and our special advisor Charles Marcus (pictured here mid-interview).

The interviews add up to a great primer on where quantum technology stands today, and the opportunities for founders and investors alike.

Give them a listen:

Ton’s interview (in Dutch): bnr.nl/podcast/degrot…

Chad and Charles’ interviews (in English after a short Dutch intro): bnr.nl/podcast/degrot…

[Photo: Rebekka Mell]