Burnaby-based Quantum Computing Company D-Wave Raises $30 Million

The supercomputer startup has raised $30.2 million in its latest round of financing

D-Wave Systems Inc., which touts itself as the world’s first commercial quantum computing company, designs and builds warp-speed supercomputers out of its research facility in Burnaby.

The company announced Friday that it has secured $30 million in funding from both new and existing investors Goldman Sachs, BDC Capital, Harris &Harris Group and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. With this latest investment, D-Wave has now raised a total of $160 million.

The new capital will be put towards software development and personnel, said Vern Brownell, CEO of D-Wave, in a statement, as part of the company’s push to develop commercial applications of its quantum computing technology.

“As the only company delivering a commercial quantum computing solution, D-Wave occupies a unique place in the market and has a head start few other organizations could match,” said David Campbell, managing director in the merchant banking division of Goldman Sachs.

The round comes just over a year after the company inked its a $15-million contract to install one of its 512-qubit computers in an artificial intelligence lab, a project co-led by NASA and Google, in Mountain View, California. According to founder Geordie Rose, that sale was an important marker in D-Wave’s transition from an R&D shop into a commercial enterprise.

“We’ve turned from an intellectual-property aggregator, a manager of basic research, into an engineering firm with a specific vision of what we want build,” Rose told BCBusiness back in January.

D-Wave has focused on commercial applications for its hardware in recent years, from genomic analysis in drug research to using machine learning to gain critical insight from enormous data sets. To date, the company has primarily sold its chips to government researchers and bluechip firms like Google and DNA-SEQ, who has used it in fields as diverse as genetically personalized medicine, space mission planning and systems optimization.