One of the more interesting conversations I had at the recent Hannover Messe Press Preview in Germany was with Nikola Strah, Commercial Director for Classiq, a six-year-old Tel Aviv, Israel-based company with more than 100 employees. The company has a platform for programming quantum computers. Strah said that Classiq is currently the best funded quantum software startup, as it has received more than $200 million in funding.
“Quantum computers will provide large advantages in the future, and they are already here and can be used — but a lot of things need to be solved, to have any real kind of business advantages,” Strah said.
Nikola Strah, Commercial Director for Classiq, at the Hannover Messe press preview event.
Quantum computers aren’t just the domain of academia anymore, and you can rent them over the cloud. Classiq does work with all major producers, such as AWS, Microsoft, Righetti, ion Q, continuum, and IBM. Strah said that companies can use its platform to develop your code on a high level.
“As a programmer, you don’t need to know the intricacies of the technology, and the platform helps you to develop the code and implement it on a quantum computer. But the main point is, quantum computers are already there. In couple of years, we will probably have a quantum computer showing real advantage in performance and speed over the classical computers,” he said. “Most of our customers and partners, they’re already using our platform to be quantum ready, because you need a software that runs on those machines. You need to prepare your team. You need to test your use cases. You need to develop your use cases, your IP, and this is where we help them.”
Last month, Classiq, along with Comcast and AMD, announced the completion of a groundbreaking trial aimed at improving Internet delivery by leveraging quantum algorithms to supercharge network routing resilience.
“We launched these trials with Classiq last year with the goal of understanding how quantum software and technology could tackle real network challenges. Our results have shown that quantum computing for network optimization isn’t theoretical — it’s practical, scalable, and grounded in the needs of our customers,” said Elad Nafshi, Chief Network Officer, Comcast Connectivity and Platforms.
Other partner examples that Strah cited include helping BMW work on different optimization problems in automobiles, such as the cooling system or Mitsubishi Chemical working on material simulation and chemistry simulation.
What about you?
For the typical design engineer, what will the quantum computing shift mean? How will this all affect you?
Strah thinks that is a very good question but acknowledges that anything is possible and the future is extremely difficult to predict.
“I think what we will see five years from now is some real kind of business value out of this, with quantum applications maybe not impacting each individual engineer at a manufacturing level. But what you will be able to do is, for example, optimize production lines in a manufacturing company where you might consider not one but hundreds of different machines,” he said. “If you want to optimize the parts flow, the process of manufacturing, maybe even different components, the simulations you can do will become better, and we will start seeing real quantum advantage for the businesses.”
“Individual engineers will profit from and benefit from those applications; somebody else will program them, somebody else may execute those programs, but they will be able to benefit definitely in that line. On a longer scale, such as 10-15 years from now, this is not easy to predict. Imagine how it was with classical computers 80 years ago, when someone thought that we’d need only 12 computers in the whole world, or we would only need 10 kilobytes of memory. Now what we have is incredible compared to that. That will be the disruption of quantum. We will start seeing the real advantages, and then suddenly all that kind of ecosystem will emerge, with people working on different use cases, people imagining new applications.”
I asked Strah about the current pushback on AI because of how much water and energy the server farms are using. Would there be a similar issue with quantum computing?
“One of the motivations for quantum computing, when it was still a research topic, was that there are certain processes that you can make much more efficient with quantum computing, because they are inherently energy intensive,” he said. “There is the Haber-Bosch process [the primary industrial method for producing ammonia], which is used for creating fertilizers. And it’s one of the most energy intensive processes in the world. It has been really the fundamental key to our agriculture and food chains. If, [with quantum computing] we take that chemical process and make it more efficient and less energy intensive, imagine what that would mean. That would mean the chemistry industry would not need as much energy for that. This is kind of the big promise. We need to see what’s possible. There are so many things where we just are starting to grasp what’s there — and what’s possible with this technology.”