Quantum computing company, D-Wave Systems, has raised $30 million

Quantum computing technology company D-Wave Systems has raised a new $28.4 million round of funding, according to a new filing on the SEC’s site. This latest round, the largest since a $30 million round in October 2012, brings the company’s total funding to approximately $160 million. Investments in the round came from new and existing investors include Fidelity Canada Fund, Goldman Sachs, Draper Fisher Jurveston, and the Business Development Bank of Canada. This comes weeks after a recent controversy regarding whether or not the company’s quantum computers — employed by the likes of Lockheed Martin, Google, and NASA — actually offer “quantum speedup,” solving problems faster than a traditional computer. Here’s how Scientific American’s Seth Fletcher summarized the study that started the controversy: “The first thing to know about the D-Wave Two is that it is not a general quantum computer—it’s what is called a quantum annealer, which should, in theory, be capable of solving certain types of optimization and sorting problems exponentially faster than a classical computer. To test it, the authors of the Science paper tested 1,000 randomly chosen cost-function problems on both the D-Wave Two and a classical annealer. They found that, overall, the D-Wave did not exhibit quantum speedup on the set of problems used. The group phrased its findings very diplomatically. “This does not mean the device cannot have quantum speedup,” lead author Matthias Troyer says. “It just means that in the tests we conducted, [quantum speedup] was not there.”