Excited to announce our investment in Strangeworks! Find out why we invested in Quantum Computing space and read our newest blog post.

Strangeworks: Taking Compute into Strange New Directions.

Watching the Dr. Strange movies is a mind-binding, fantastical, and somewhat headache-inducing exercise at times, but a key learning that Dr. Stephen Strange manages to convey is that strange is good, and strange opens up new possibilities.

We’ll dive into these new possibilities and see how Strangeworks unlocks them later. But first, let’s set the stage.

The Moore’s Law Era has brought about abundant access to computing resources, enabling entire new industries and research fields to flourish due to our newfound abilities to collect and analyze large quantities of data in healthcare, physics, manufacturing, energy, materials development, and more.

But Moore’s Law will come to an end.

We will stop being able to double the number of transistors on a chip. We will stop being able to shrink the die on which these transistors live. There are fundamental thermal limits that constrain development, and we are fast approaching these thresholds.

The semiconductor industry has pushed the envelope, leveraging mechanisms as variegated as 3D structures to creative designs to parallelization to new application-specific architectures and novel processing units such as GPUs, TPUs, ASICs, etc.

But the problem space has ceased to be monolithic. Problems are no longer solved by tasking a major supercomputer to brute force them. We’re starting to think smarter, instead of just harder. We repackage problems, simulations, and calculations to be structured in a way that is optimal for the target hardware architecture.

“The method of using brute force transistors and the advances of Moore’s law has largely ran its course.” — Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia

This is going to be increasingly necessary as we drive adoption of next-generation computational architectures such as quantum computing and analog computing.

There has been a lot of hype about quantum computing in past years, so let’s dispel some of the hype and talk about the state of the industry.

State of Quantum Computing

Quantum computing hardware is maturing, with major announcements coming seemingly every other week from hardware developers and academia. IBM has published an ambitious technical release roadmap for quantum computers, Google has done the same, and existing players such as Hitachi, Fujitsu, and D-Wave have had early hardware in market in the form of annealers for years.

Major enterprises in pharma, finance, materials, chemicals, automotive have committed significant resources to building out their quantum computing efforts to realize meaningful value in early application areas such as drug development, financial portfolio optimization, and supply chain route optimization. But why aren’t we seeing benefits being realized more broadly?

Simply put, today’s quantum computers are like babies. We don’t know how to talk to them yet (interconnects still under development), there is often misinterpretation (lack of interoperability), the quality of communication tends to be inconsistent (errors), there’s a brain:body control development delay (error correction as qubits scale), and the optimal operating conditions are EXTREMELY narrow (cryogenics). Oh, and there are a lot of gurgles and tantrums thrown into the mix that make it difficult to achieve usable results.

But early hardware gives us a glimpse into near-future capabilities, and we must invest in building out a framework that allows users to access and use these resources.

Why did we invest in Strangeworks? What problem are they solving?

Getting up to speed in the quantum computing industry will take time, and there are a lot of challenges the ecosystem needs to address before significant quantum advantage will be realized. Enterprises need to invest in becoming quantum-ready today, and right now that means competing for scarce talent, significant expenditure on compute resources, uncertainty around timing of value realization, and technical uncertainty around which hardware providers will be the winners in the long term.

Sound familiar? These aren’t new issues. In early iterations of classical compute, enterprises faced similar obstacles.

When we were thinking about Hitachi Ventures’ perspective on quantum computing, we looked at past trends, be it the move from personal computers to mainframes or the shift from on-prem to cloud computing and saw two key areas of value accrual. Hardware developers and cloud computing service providers have been the areas where value has accreted — especially in nascent markets — and we feel that similar opportunities will emerge in quantum and quantum-inspired computing.

There is work that remains to be done to get to completely accessible quantum-advantage for all. But even before we get to fully realized quantum advantage, enterprises can take advantage of quantum value today, and this is where Strangeworks comes in.

Strangeworks is laser-focused on addressing and removing the frictions associated with quantum computing adoption. The team has built an elegant platform for users that abstracts away the complexities of working with and designing applications for different types of quantum and quantum-inspired hardware, and makes it as easy as flipping a switch to turn on a compute instance and to use quantum applications.

Strangeworks is the hub for the quantum ecosystem, building gateways to public clouds and offering tangible value to all stakeholders through partnership and collaboration:

• Enterprises eliminate the need for high CAPEX investments that quickly depreciate and focus on realizing the value of quantum, not the complexities of working with quantum.
• Hardware providers focus on their core competencies while leveraging Strangeworks to access interested and primed customers who are looking to consume quantum hardware services.
• Software providers (application developers, frameworks, etc.) focus on their core competencies and develop increasingly more valuable products for customers.

Given Hitachi’s long history in computing, with their first transistorized electronic computer release in 1959, and the release of the fastest supercomputer of the era based on superconducting principles in 1989. Hitachi remains an important player in the computing sector, with groups such as Hitachi DSS (Digital Systems & Services), Hitachi Vantara, Global Logic, and others focused on supporting the IT sector today and helping accelerate the technologies of tomorrow.

Hitachi is already providing its CMOS annealers via the Strangeworks platform to help increase accessibility to quantum-inspired services, and we are delighted to have support from leaders such as Norihiro Suzuki-san, CTO of Hitachi, Ltd., and others, and we look forward to working with stakeholders at Hitachi closely to help accelerate broader industrial adoption of quantum and quantum-inspired computing.

Team

Strangeworks provides the interface for exotic compute capabilities. They focus on the hard stuff so you don’t have to, and they’re the right people to do it.

Quantum computing is a nascent industry that needs charismatic, opinionated leaders that will stand for the industry and broaden access across the board. Whurley is that kind of leader. His list of accolades is too long to list, but his experience speaks for itself, first as an early contributor and proponent in the open-source community and subsequent stints bringing about new compute capabilities during his time at IBM, Apple, and more recently in media and entertainment. We wanted the best, and Whurley is just that.

No less impressive is the rest of the Strangeworks team. CTO Justin Youens brings decades of experience building enterprise applications, co-founder David Cardona is a legal and operations wizard, and CSO Steve Gibson is charting the company’s path to commercial success. This team has worked together extensively, and that familiarity shows in the company’s efficiency, focus, and intentionality.

The team is just getting started, with new key hires such as Idalia Friedson and Jessica Ponds filling out senior leadership and giving the company the chops to compete in the rest of this market.

We’re thrilled to have led Strangeworks’ $24M Series A financing and want to thank our fellow believers at IBM Ventures, RTX Ventures — the venture capital arm of Raytheon Technologies, Ultratech, RGI, and GBV for joining the fundraise, along with existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greatpoint Ventures, and Ecliptic Capital. Working with the Strangeworks team has been exciting, and we’re looking forward to helping bring about our shared vision for exotic-compute-for-all.

You can see the full press release here.

Please reach out, we’d love to talk quantum with you and to introduce you to the Strangeworks team if you’re interested in learning more.

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Ankesh Madan, Senior Associate, Hitachi Ventures

Jan Marchewski, Analyst, Hitachi Ventures

Tobias Jahn, Partner, Hitachi Ventures