Aliro Technologies, a software company focused on providing a portable, hardware-agnostic, and noise-aware platform for quantum computing (QC), today emerged from stealth with the closing of its $2.7 million seed round, led by Flybridge Capital Partners, including Crosslink Ventures, and Samsung NEXT’s Q Fund. Aliro’s vision is to commercialize new software technologies that make today’s quantum hardware more accessible and useful for any coder, making hybrid classical-quantum programs the new standard. The company was spun out of Harvard’s quantum computing lab, co-founded by Prof. Prineha Narang, a luminary in the quantum computing space.
There are a proliferation of quantum computing hardware technologies available today with the market set to reach $2.2 billion by 2025, yet it remains in its infancy due to a lack of software to tie it together. Aliro’s software stack provides hardware independence and optimizations from the algorithm all the way down to the hardware, on one unified platform. With Aliro, any QC users, researchers or algorithm developers will have access to a development and execution platform that takes away the pain of variations felt with hardware-specific software and hardware optimizations.
Aliro will also provide a suite of technical tools such as validation schemes, visualizations, benchmarks, error-correcting codes, application-specific interfaces, and general performance improvements to empower software developers to execute algorithms more efficiently and more accurately, without the need for deep quantum expertise.
Prof. Narang has been honored as one of Forbes’ “30 under 30 in Science”, as well as MIT Technology Review’s “35 under 35 Innovators”. She set up Aliro in Spring 2019 with two of her students and a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard to create a new software approach designed to hasten the arrival of “quantum value” — the point where classical software and solution developers can obtain incremental value by adding quantum computing to their current classical methods.
“Aliro develops software, designed with a ‘write-it-once-run-anywhere’ mentality,” said Prof. Prineha Narang, Co-Founder of Aliro Technologies. “Aliro’s goal is to enable software developers using its hardware-independent, cloud-ready platform to take advantage of the power of quantum computing. The platform will facilitate composition and verification of quantum, as well as hybrid (classical-quantum), algorithms and enable their execution on the best quantum hardware for the job. Aliro’s software lowers the barrier to entry for early movers who want to leverage the amazing power of quantum computing. We’re excited to have the backing of the best in the business to help us achieve our goal.”
“I have been working with the Aliro team for the past year and could not be more excited about the opportunity to help them build a foundational company in Quantum Computing software,” said David Aronoff, General Partner at Flybridge. “Their innovative approach and unique combination of leading quantum researchers and a world-class executive team make Aliro a formidable player in this exciting new sector.”
“At Samsung NEXT we are focused on what the world will look like in the future, helping to make that a reality,” said Ajay Singh, Co- Lead at Samsung NEXT’s Q Fund. “We were drawn to Prineha and her team by their impressive backgrounds and extent of research into quantum computing. We believe that Aliro’s unique software products will revolutionize the entire category, by speeding up the inflection point where quantum becomes as accessible as classical computing. This could have implications on anything from drug discovery, materials development, nanoscience or chemistry. Aliro’s ability to map quantum circuits to heterogeneous hardware in an efficient way will be truly transformative and we’re thrilled to be on this journey with them.”
For more information, please visit: Aliro’s website
About Aliro
Aliro Technologies, a spin-out of Harvard’s Quantum Information Sciences Lab, makes software that facilitates accessibility to present day quantum computers. It offers a hardware-independent platform for developers to write quantum software and helps optimize it according to the specific details of the device, or, conversely, selects the device that maximizes a program’s performance. The company was founded in Spring 2019 out of Harvard labs by Prof. Prineha Narang, a luminary in the quantum science and technology space, with start-up veteran Jim Ricotta joining as CEO. To date Aliro has raised $2.7 million seed round and is based out of Boston, MA.
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