We’ve thought hard about the hard questions.

• Why invest in Nu Quantum?
  • Nu Quantum is the largest quantum networking company globally today, and the category creator of the networking segment of the quantum computing stack. It is also the leader compared to other companies in the quantum networking space in terms of number of commercial partnerships, technology & IP, and income (revenue, grants and equity). Nu Quantum’s team has an exceptional track record of commercial maturity and of continuous execution on milestones. The total addressable market for Quantum Networking is estimated to be very large ($44BN Quantum Computer Networking, not including sensing and communications use-cases), and underpins all scaled-up quantum systems. Nu Quantum is set to capture the majority of this market.
• Why now?
  • The quantum industry is now mature enough that the need to provide a very clear roadmap to commercial-scale computing is becoming urgent for all QPU companies. As this path will need networking, now is a pivotal time for Nu Quantum to be able to establish partnerships with the leading QPU companies world-wide, and to be first-to-market with its pioneering quantum networking products. Nu Quantum can set the agenda and the de-facto standards for quantum networks globally - and the window of opportunity is now.
• You are proposing a radical change in quantum computing architecture. How will you get QPU companies to follow you?
  • Nu Quantum can leverage multiple angles to achieve the required shift in the industry over the next few years -
    • QPU companies are under higher and higher pressure to provide a clear and ‘engineerable’ path to commercial scale (see the latest DARPA QBI call, or the UK Quantum Missions). Quantum networking provides an alternative, lower-risk and more predictable path to scale, which requires manufacturing of more systems rather than relying on R&D breakthroughs to deliver larger monolithic systems. Everyone wins if quantum computing systems can scale faster.
    • End users are most interested in the use-cases requiring large, fault tolerant systems. They see Nu Quantum as an enabler of this and their support can help steer the industry towards large and mature networked systems.
    • Datacenter, Cloud companies and Hyperscalers want to engage with companies able to deliver deplyable systems that can be upgraded and scaled up. They also desire interoperability - they want to interface to these systems via software layers which are as abstracted as possible from the qubits. A quantum networking infrastructure interconnecting QPUs achieves both.
    • See our Commercial Quantum Datacenter Alliance to read about our current partners.

• Who is your most direct competitor?
  • Our most direct competitors are quantum networking companies aiming to address the distributed quantum computing market. There are only three of them (read about them here —> Quantum Networking Ecosystem), and were funded post 2022. None of them have a full solution - they all are developing 1 particular component which could (or could not) be used to network QPUs.
    • Company with a Qubit-Photon Interface: NanoQT, Japan, is developing a QPI aimed at Neutral Atom qubits. It is not adaptable to other qubit types. NanoQT have not developed Quantum Networking Unit (QNU) or Quantum Error Correction (QEC) technology to our knowledge.
    • Companies developing ‘Quantum Memories’. Welinq and Lightsynq. Read about why quantum memories are not needed to network QPUs, and can be detrimental to overall system performance here Quantum Networking Ecosystem Analysis.
  • Read about other approaches to reaching Fault Tolerance here.

• What are the biggest breakthroughs you’ve had as a company?
  • Breakthrough on hardware: we have built prototypes for the two main quantum networking subsystems (QPI and QNU), and they are meeting target specifications. These are world-first prototypes. In October 2024, we reported successful transatlantic shipping and optical benchmarking of our Gen1 Qubit-Photon Interface prototype by a partner. A Qubit-Photon Interface (QPI) is the quantum equivalent of a Network Interface Card (NIC), and we are the first company to ever make such a device as a horizontal product aimed at interfacing to a range of qubits, and targeting >100x performance than current state-of-the-art. This performance has now been validated optically, ready for qubit integration in 2025. Read about it here.
  • Breakthrough on architecture: our innovations on Distributed Quantum Error Correction and the implementation of new and more efficient codes have yielded an architecture which demonstrates that large, networked Fault Tolerant systems can be built using near-term available QPU technology plus our quantum networking technology. This architecture is robust to realistic quantum networking error levels, and scales efficiently to thousands of logical qubits with high encoding rates (100:1).

• The company’s tech. ambition is too great for its size and funding - can you really improve and progress QPI QNU QEC to the required level, simultaneously?
  • Nu Quantum has a track-record of delivery - we have built up robust Programme Management processes and parallel engineering processes which have allowed us to deliver on very complex multidisciplinary technology during our pre-A period. We now have the organisational structure in place to scale up the technical team across disciplines and be able to tackle larger projects.
  • The cross-stack, ‘systems’ view is one of our critical competitive advantages. All three technology areas inform each other - the sum of the parts is larger than the individual.

• How can you compete with the native resources ($$$, people, IP, facilities etc etc) of IBM, Google, et al?
  • Nu Quantum has a significant technical and commercial competitive advantage. The extremely high complexity of networking systems and the demanding hardware performance means that, even with infinite funding, it would take several years for a company to catch up with us if starting from scratch. Most QPU companies (including the larger ones - IBM, Google), do not have quantum networking IP or capability at present.
• Isn’t Quantum completely overblown? Is there a Quantum Winter coming?
  • Arguably, we are in a ‘Quantum Winter’ right now, embedded within the wider downturn of all technology markets, and the disillusionment caused by some of the quantum companies who went public in 2021 but have failed to deliver high returns yet. However, even whilst in a so-called Quantum Winter, large funding rounds are happening, huge amount of progress is reported every week by industry players, Governments continue to commit ~$BN long-term budgets to quantum, and large corporates continue to invest in the technology and in the investigation of its applications.
• When is the next grant going to come in and will in be the same size as your current contracts?
  • In February 2024, the UK Government announced a £2.5BN Quantum Strategy over 10 years, structured around 5 Missions. The first two and most important Missions are around scaled-up quantum computing, and around quantum networking - these will get most funding allocation. Nu Quantum, as the leading quantum networking company and only quantum networking company in the UK, and due to our track-record of winning bids and contracts with UK Government and delivering successfully to them, expect to be able to access funding from the Quantum Strategy.
  • We expect to receive the next grant or contract from UK Government within 2025, once the new budget has been approved for Financial Year 2025, after the recent General Election.
• Can you really justify the increase in valuation in just 18 months?
  • Yes. Nu Quantum has performed beyond the ordinary in the past 18 months, delivering beyond expectations on both technical and commercial milestones. You can see a comprehensible summary of all of our achievements since our last term sheet here.
  • We can justify the valuation by looking at recent comparables in the industry - a review of these can be found here.

• Will the immature supply chain of the Quantum Industry impact your ability to scale to significantly larger amounts of nodes?
  • Quantum supply chains must get more mature to enable the growth of the industry. In the next ~4 years to Commercial-scale Quantum Computing take-off, it will be a priority of quantum companies and governments to ensure more robust supply chains.
  • At Nu Quantum, we take supply chain management tracking seriously as part of our Operations Department. We have processes in place to engage with good suppliers, to mitigate the risk of supply chain challenges and we have plans in place to address the weakest links in our supply chain over the Series A period.

• Why are you confident that you will achieve the required networking performance to enable Fault Tolerant Scale Out? Are there any fundamental technical blockers to scaling up Nu Quantum’s existing technology to satisfy the DQC blueprint and enable useful QC?
  • Nu Quantum has carried our a detailed analysis of every possible contribution to errors and loss in the quantum system, and we are confident that achieving the levels of fidelity required to enable Fault Tolerant Quantum Computing at scale will be achievable.
  • Nu Quantum is not aware of any fundamental technical blockers to achieving the required performance or scale.

• Is your dependency on third parties to enable you to deliver your technology and product road map too high risk?
  • Nu Quantum is carrying our a dual technology and product roadmap in order to mitigate the risk of depending on qubit companies to advance.
    • In-house qubit development for commercialisation of Quantum Networking Testbed
    • QPU partnerships for commercialisation of Intermediate Distributed QC and Fault Tolerant Distributed QC
• What happens to Nu Quantum if Google builds a multi-million qubit QC?
  • Even if a mammoth, CERN-type system is ever built, this will be a one-time, incredible fragile, expensive, and not upgradable system. It will fantastic to demonstrate the usefulness of quantum computers and to trigger a huge uptick in interest from end-users, which will in turn drive the push for more commercially-deployable systems that can be integrated into currrent datacenter infrastructures, and can be also eventually upgradable to larger numbers of qubits. These mature commercial systems will be networked ones.
• Can you network all kinds of qubits?
  • All kinds of qubits will require networking to achieve commercial scales. All of the main kinds of qubits being pursued by the industry (ions, atoms, superconducting, silicon spins, colour centers) can be networked. Some, however, are ‘easier’ to network than others due to how readily they interact with light at optical frequencies. This is reflected in our roadmap.
    • Qubits that are ‘optically-active’ such are ions and atoms are easier to network, and hence we tackle them first in our roadmap, and we are actively developing hardware to network these qubit types.
    • Qubits that are not ‘optically-active’, but that interact with microwave photons instead such as superconducting and silicon spin qubits, require an additionaly technology (microwave-to-optical frequency conversion) to be developed.
      • There are very credible companies and research groups around the world (e.g. QphoX, CalTech) working on this problem and there has been very impressive progress reported in the past two years.
      • We hence watch the space actively, and actively partner with superconducting companies and with transduction companies to understand how our networking products will be adapted to these qubits as soon as transduction is available.
• Isn’t integration with QPUs too big a challenge?
  • QPU-QPI integration is an engineering challenge, but not an insurmountable one.
  • For both Trapped Ions and Neutral Atoms, the QPI can be a discrete module that is integrated in a ‘networking zone’, far away from the main ‘computing zone’ - hence we will be able to improve each part independently, as well as ensure that the QPI does not negatively affect the performance of the computation qubits in the QPUs.
  • For each kind of qubit, integration with different vendors’ QPUs will follow similar procedures. Our continuous conversations with QPU companies have allowed us to identify how integration may take place, and what aspects of control, synchronisation, etc need to be built with QPU requirements in mind. Our networking solutions are designed to be as adaptable as possible and built with scalability and flexibility in mind from their inception.
• Is there a comparison in the classical industry of who Nu Quantum aims to be like?
  • There are a few good comparisons in the classical computing and networks industries:
    • Nu Quantum does for QPUs what Arista and Cisco do for CPUs.
    • Nu Quantum does for QPUs what Mellanox does for GPUs.