Vancouver firm among top tech pioneers
World Economic Forum places 1QBit on global list of promising companies
A Vancouver company that develops software for quantum computers was named by the World Economic Forum on Wednesday as one of the world’s top 49 most promising tech pioneers for 2015.
1QBit is the only Canadian company on the list, which in the past has recognized such companies as Google, Kickstarter and Dropbox for being among the most innovative companies in the world.
“It is an exciting day for us,” said 1QBit CEO Andrew Fursman, who co-founded the now-close-to-30-person company in 2013 with 1QBit president Landon Downs.
“I think that for us the point of this moment is to be able to reflect a little bit about where we have come from. Basically, it was some researchers and business people in Vancouver identifying this opportunity and being able to put together an organization that has garnered this sort of international recognition — especially given the business and technical diligence that a group like the World Economic Forum puts into this,” Fursman said.
“This is really the beginning of our journey. I think there is going to be a lot more to come and we look forward to telling that story.”
It is a tale that started late in 2012, with the idea of preparing for a time when quantum computing would become a viable and essential tool.
“It wasn’t like we could go out and hire quantum software engineers. We had to go and hire really smart people and help them become quantum software engineers,” Fursman said. “Now these machines are starting to show some real promise and there have been some exciting
“It wasn’t like we could go out and hire quantum software engineers. We had to go and hire really smart people and help them become quantum software engineers.
ANDREW FURSMAN
1QBIT CO-FOUNDER
results, kind of demonstrating the power of the hardware.
“Even though it is still in its infancy, we are really focused on trying to connect that power to the industries where we think it is going to be most disruptive in the short term.”
Fursman said that includes finance, life sciences and the energy industry.
“What we see that sort of ties all of those together is that all of those industries have really high-value problems — that is to say problems that cost them a lot of money or where there is a ton of opportunity for them to make more money by solving them,” he said.
“The underlying feature is combinatorial optimization, or more colloquially, selecting the best possible answer from a very, very, very large search space. That’s really the strength of the first generation of quantum computers — being able to select the best answer from a huge population. Classical computers, as amazing and powerful as they are, happen to be also very bad at this task.”
The listed companies, representing 10 countries, were chosen from hundreds of applicants considered by a committee of 68 academics, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business people looking at such factors as innovation, potential impact and viability. U.S.-based companies accounted for two-thirds of those on the list.
1QBit has partnered with Burnaby’s D-Wave Systems, maker of the world’s first quantum computer.
Unlike traditional computers that handle data in binary digits known as bits (each a zero or one), quantum computing uses quantum bits — known as qubits — that can be in more than one state simultaneously. The future is seen as one in which quantum computing systems will be able to solve problems that could otherwise never be solved by traditional computers.
Last week, the Canadian government announced a $66.5-million investment in the University of B.C.’s Quantum Matter Institute. The money, to be invested over seven years, marks the largest government investment in a single UBC research program.