Highlights:

  • Current investors Scout Ventures, Tensility Venture Partners, Green Egg Ventures, and Rob Granieri, principal of Jane Street Capital, participated in the recent funding round, which was headed by Differential Ventures.
  • Agnostiq is the developer of Covalent, a workflow orchestration tool that hides the complexity of the underlying quantum system from the user, allowing for rapid prototyping across a wide variety of computer resources.

Agnostiq Inc., a quantum computing startup, announced that it has raised a USD 6.1 million initial investment round to advance the development of its enterprise-grade quantum and high-performance computing platform.

Existing investors like Scout Ventures, Green Egg Ventures, Tensility Venture Partners, and Rob Granieri, principal of Jane Street Capital, participated in the recent funding round, which was headed by Differential Ventures.

Toronto-based Agnostiq puts itself at the nexus of quantum and high-performance computing when the two technologies converge to enable a new generation of artificial intelligence applications. It is developing software that allows the usage of quantum computers with existing HPC technologies.

HPC frequently entails intricate processes that use a variety of computing resources. For example, someone may process pre-data on a local laptop before transferring it to a supercomputer, which will be used as input to a high-compute simulation. The results are then gathered, with an alternate resource performing post-processing to eliminate corrupt or missing records, and the findings are visualized using yet another resource. Users may interact with numerous supercomputers, cloud HPC resources, clusters, and quantum computers in complex procedures.

Agnostiq is the developer of Covalent, a workflow orchestration tool that hides the complexity of the underlying quantum system from the user, allowing for rapid prototyping across various computer resources. It is intended for pre-production research and development, allowing users to construct, test, and compare multiple processes rapidly. Unlike other platforms, Covalent can support heterogeneous processes that span clouds, on-premises clusters, and even hardware paradigms. Its goal is to reduce the operational complexity and expense of merging these new solid technologies.

According to Agnostiq, the current funding round coincides with significant investments by major hardware and cloud providers in their HPC systems. For example, Amazon Web Services Inc. recently unveiled cloud-scale HPC workloads, while Microsoft Corp. developed a new cloud-based AI supercomputer.

Agnostiq identifies the debut of Nvidia Corporation’s customized DGX Quantum platform as a significant milestone toward quantum-accelerated supercomputing. As more workloads demand HPC resources and quantum becomes an increasingly relevant modality within HPC, the firm anticipates technology such as Covalent will be indispensable to businesses seeking to integrate them.

David Magerman, Differential Ventures Managing Partner, said, “Covalent, Agnostiq’s open-source workflow orchestration platform, helps customers unify access to their cloud and on-premise HPC resources while making it easier for them to integrate new computing paradigms into their stack, such as quantum computers and other specialized hardware.”

Oktay Goktas, Chief Executive Officer of Agnostiq, stated that the current fundraising round would help democratize access to quantum computing. He stated, “It will support the development of Covalent Cloud, our commercial offering, and provide valuable support to the open-source offering.”