A few weeks ago, Union Minister of Commerce Piyush Goyal had exhorted Indian startups to work on deep-tech technologies instead of simply delivering groceries, and a deep-tech startup from the country has just managed to make a pretty significant breakthrough.
Bengaluru-based startup QpiAI has built India’s first full-stack quantum computing system. The system integrates advanced quantum processors, next-generation Quantum-HPC software platforms, and AI-enhanced quantum solutions. The quantum computing system, named QpiAI-Indus, has become one of India’s most powerful quantum computers with 25 superconducting qubits.
QpiAI was one of eight startups selected by the Indian government’s Department of Science and Technolgy under the National Quantum Mission. “As a part of India’s NQM, QpiAI is at the forefront of building the country’s quantum computing technology ecosystem, national quantum adoption programs, and creating one of the world’s largest quantum talent ecosystems,” the Department of Science and Technology said in a post on X. The startup has raised a pre-Series A round led by Deeptech VC YourNest and the Indian government’s SIDBI (Small Industries Development Bank of India), which funds small businesses.
QpiAI was founded in 2019 by Dr. Nagendra Nagaraja. Nagaraja had completed a Bachelor’s in Electronics and Communications from Bangalore University. He had then completed a Masters degree from Illinois Institute of Technology, before completing a PhD in Wireless, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence from Coventry University, UK. In 2019, he founded QpiAI to solve the challenges of complex data and large models with vertical integration of AI and Quantum Computing. “We are building most powerful technology human kind would have ever seen with intersection of AI modelling and Quantum computers to enable nextgen applications with advancement in Intelligence modelling and Intelligence compute,” he says on LinkedIn.
QpiAI’s Indus quantum computer has 25 qubits, with single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.7 percent, and two-qubit gate fidelity of 96%. It has filed 11 patents, and is headquarted in Bengaluru with offices in California, USA and Finland.
It’s not every day that an Indian startup makes waves (heh) in quantum computing, but it’s a field that’s been very much in focus over the last couple of years. Late last year, Google had released a new quantum computing chip named Willow, which was able to solve a computation in less than 5 minutes which would’ve taken leading supercomputers 10^25 years to solve, which is longer than the age of the universe. Microsoft, meanwhile, had announced that it had created a new state of matter named topoconductors, which would help create powerful quantum computers. India might still be in the early days of its quantum progress, but as QpiAI’s new quantum computer has shown, it has already thrown its hat into the quantum ring.