BC Business
Burnaby-based supercomputer manufacturer D-Wave Systems Inc. announced Thursday morning that it had raised $29 million in funding from an undisclosed “large institutional investor”. With this latest investment, the company has raised $174 million in venture capital to date, $62 million in 2014 alone. The funding will “advance [D-Wave’s] quantum hardware and software development,” said Vern Brownell, D-Wave’s CEO, in a statement.
The round closes a quiet but busy year for D-Wave, in which it boosted its patent portfolio and developed software applications of its chip technology for applications in defence and finance. The sum adds on the $30 million the company raised in July, which came from an investor group which included Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Goldman Sachs (which is also Brownell’s former employer).
The company’s main product, a computer chip the size of a thumbprint enclosed in layers of copper plating and tubes, allows its users (Google and Lockheed Martin among them) to run massive calculations at faster speeds than conventional superconductors.
Over the past year the company has continued to form partnerships with high-profile laboratories and universities that allow access to its superconductors for academic research. D-Wave has also signed contracts with DNA-SEQ and 1QBit, companies developing quantum software applications. Unspecified previous investors also participated in the round, according to the company.