Dr Carmen Palacios-Berraquero. Image: Nu Quantum
Founded in 2018, this start-up wants to ensure that the ‘transformational impacts’ of quantum computing are fully realised in the future.
From an early age, Dr Carmen Palacios-Berraquero knew she wanted to study physics.
After studying physics in Imperial College London – and obtaining a master’s degree – Palacios-Berraquero began her PhD studies in quantum information at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory with the expectation that she would pursue an academic career and become a professor. However, she ultimately became disillusioned with that idea and decided her career path would lead elsewhere after her PhD concluded.
While working on a challenging experimental project, she was approached by the university about a patent she had filed during her studies and it was suggested that she should join the university’s Impulse entrepreneurial programme. From there, everything began to “snowball”.
“I began to understand more about the quantum industry. 2018 felt like a transitional year in the industry. In fact, this was when the majority of quantum start-ups were founded. It seemed like the moment when research leaves academia and goes out into the real world,” she says.
After being asked to pitch at an event in London, she was invited to join an accelerator programme for Series A companies. Wishing to take part in the programme, Palacios-Berraquero founded our Start-up of the Week Nu Quantum in 2018 purely so she could experience the programme. After a while, she realised the entrepreneurial life was “quite fun” and that she was good at it, and the rest is history.
Today, Nu Quantum is a quantum network company that wants to “unlock commercial quantum scale-out” by developing advanced entanglement tech. Quantum entanglement is when a group of particles remain connected and operate in tandem, even when they’re separated over a vast distance.
As well as being the founder of Nu Quantum, Palacios-Berraquero – who was awarded the Jocelyn Bell Burnell national medal in 2018 – serves as the company’s CEO.
“We want to scale quantum computing to achieve fault tolerance and usefulness more quickly than can be achieved monolithically,” explains Palacios-Berraquero. “But we also want to help the industry mature, so it can scale in an interoperable, horizontal way, rather than just vertically, similar to the scaling of classical computing.”
(Qu)bits and pieces
The possibilities of quantum computing are extraordinary and could have an enormous effect on a multitude of entities and functions, such as encryption and drug development. But to successfully develop a useful quantum computer, as Palacios-Berraquero explains, the amount of qubits needs to scale from hundreds to hundreds of thousands. And to achieve “transformational impacts”, quantum computers must scale to millions of qubits.
“The bottleneck is when attempting to scale a single unit, as the physics and engineering problems limit their ability to reach the scale that resembles the level of a quantum data centre.
“Our approach is to interconnect many quantum processing units (QPU) by creating high-quality entanglement between them, forming a larger and more useful quantum computer, which is distributed for the first time at a data-centre scale.”
The start-up’s products include a quantum networking unit (QNU) capable of efficiently scaling discrete QPUs to form a larger and more useful quantum computer, and a qubit photon interface (QPI) to make an efficient connection between QPU and QNU.
“We are building the essential infrastructure of quantum networking, which will be as essential to quantum computing as classical networking is to today’s cloud and high-performance computing environments,” says Palacios-Berraquero. “We are accelerating it out of the lab and towards the data centre for real-world use.”
Current progress
Since its establishment in 2018, Nu Quantum has made significant progress in the start-up scene. Last year, the company raised £7m in a pre-Series A funding round from leading VCs including Amadeus Capital, IQ Capital and the National Security Strategic Investment Fund. The company is currently raising its full Series A.
The start-up is also constantly growing its team. Just last month, Nu Quantum appointed industry veteran Dr Bob Sutor as a non-executive director on its board of directors.
As the company continues work on building its first deployed projects with collaborators such as the National Quantum Computing Centre and Cisco, Palacios-Berraquero is enjoying the start-up journey, even with the challenges that arise along the way.
“There is always something going on! I think as you learn to deal with old challenges, new ones always crop up,” she says. “It’s constant growth, but I really enjoy it.”
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