A Boston-based startup released software designed to make it easier for companies to use invented algorithms for quantum computing to improve business processes.
The software has already been used by several banks and investment firms, including the Spanish bank BBVA, to optimize financial portfolios and better assess risk. It has also been used by petrochemical companies to optimize their processes.
Zapata, the company behind the software, anticipates that it will also be used to help companies in other industries build better batteries for electric vehicles, optimize logistics routes and supply chains, and find new pharmaceuticals.
Zapata was co-founded in Boston in 2017 by Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a leading researcher in quantum chemistry who was at Harvard University and is now at the University of Toronto, and members of its research laboratory.
The company’s software, which it calls Orquestra, provides a way for companies to use algorithms that were originally designed to take advantage of the unique properties of quantum computers. These powerful machines, which are just beginning to find practical applications, take advantage of the strange properties of quantum physics to perform calculations.
For example, while classical computers, which is what scientists call non-quantum computers, represent information in a binary form called bits, represented by a 0 or a 1, quantum computers can represent information in multiple states simultaneously, so that the information can be 0 and 1, and in some cases, any state between those two numbers. Also, in a normal computer, each bit works independently of the others. But in a quantum computer, the qubits, as the units of quantum information are called, impact each other, working collectively to find a solution.
These two properties make quantum computers potentially much more powerful than conventional ones, allowing them to perform some calculations much faster than in a classical machine. In fact, in theory, quantum computers could perform some calculations that no conventional computer could process in a reasonable amount of time.
Last year, Google used a quantum computer to demonstrate what it claimed was such a calculation, a milestone in computing known as “quantum supremacy.” In the future, this may allow quantum computers to do things like discover new materials with incredible properties, such as superconductors at room temperature, or crack the most common form of digital encryption out there.
For the most part, today’s quantum computers are too error prone to be used in these kinds of feats. Last week, IBM announced an ambitious roadmap for the development of its quantum computers that can see machines capable enough for these types of solutions by the end of the decade.
But algorithms that have been designed to run on quantum computers can sometimes offer better and faster solutions than conventional algorithms, even if they run on a classical computer. That means companies could still benefit from using these quantum techniques today.
Orquestra enables programmers, even those without highly specialized training in how to write software for a quantum computer, to use these “quantum algorithms” on a real, simulated, or classical quantum computer. It also helps programmers to automatically segment parts of whatever problem they are working on, using a quantum computer to do some of the work and a classical computer to do the rest. In the software world, Orquestra is what is known as an orchestration platform, hence its name.
Christopher Savoie, CEO of Zapata, says Orquestra is designed to allow programmers to work with any vendor’s library of quantum algorithms and help them figure out the best way to run them on any quantum computer or a combination of quantum and traditional computing. . It also allows companies to easily change the type of underlying hardware they are using, so they don’t have to limit themselves to a particular quantum computing vendor.
Savoie says that some academic quantum researchers have wrongly discredited the current uses of quantum computers and quantum algorithms because they still cannot do things that are impossible to do on a classical computer. While being able to solve these kinds of ultra-difficult problems can be critical for some industrial use cases, such as inventing new types of materials or chemicals, for many companies, he says, doing the impossible isn’t what matters. In business, time is money, and in many cases simply running an existing process faster than classical computers is enough to justify the use of quantum computers and quantum algorithms. The fact that the solutions that quantum approaches offer may also be superior is an added bonus, he says.
Zapata has received $ 31 million in venture capital funding to date from investors, including the venture capital arms of Honeywell, Comcast, Robert Bosch and BASF, as well as Prelude Ventures, Pillar VC and The Engine.
