“Do you believe in the multiverse?” our petite and cheerful guide Angelina asked me when I told her what I do for a living, while navigating the rambunctious street’s of Hanoi’s Old Quarter.
It was not a conversation I was expecting to have on a vegan street food tour in Vietnam, but as Angelina studies AI and VR (and as we are both avid Marvel fans), our chat took a turn down a dimensional rabbit hole.
I wonder what kind of questions she would have for the founders of Multiverse Computing — a Spanish deeptech scaleup. It offers what it calls value-based quantum computing solutions (as opposed to scientifically interesting but not immediately offering commercially valuable applications, one would imagine). The company was just chosen as one out of 48 that make up the first cohort of the European Innovation Council’s Scaling Club.
Falling within the “Next-Gen Computing” category, Multiverse Computing develops quantum and “quantum-inspired” algorithms to utilise a combination of both current NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) era devices and classical computers. So connecting two realms, in a sense.
Multiverse’s software platform, Singularity, connects to quantum computers on the cloud, but with a user-friendly front-end. The company says this makes quantum computing “really easy” for users who have no previous experience at all.
Enrique Lizaso Olmos, CEO and co-founder of Multiverse Computing said that being included in the EIC scaling program was “a wonderful recognition of our achievements so far and of the importance of quantum computing to Europe and the rest of the world.”
The company, which boasts 40% PhDs among its 100 employees along with 95 patents, has also developed CompactifAI. This, it says, is an LLM compressor, which makes AI systems more “efficient and portable,” reducing both size and retraining and inference costs.
Quantum, cosmic rays, and extended reality
Joining Multiverse Computing in the Next-Gen Computing category of the EIC Scaling Club are, among others, photonics startup QuiX Quantum, cosmic ray 3D-imaging company Gscan, and Dispelix, which develops waveguide combiners used as displays for extended reality (XR) devices.
The other categories are:
Digital Security and Trust — including federated learning platform Sherpa.ai, fraud prevention startup Threatmark, and cyber intelligence firm Quointellience.
Renewable Energies — including rigid sail technology company bound4blue, wind-turbine makers Modvion, and wave energy system supplier CorPower Ocean.
Smart Mobility — including teledriving software startup Vey, logistics optimisation platform Transmetrics, and the “world’s first cargo drone airline,” Dronamics.
Time of the essence to build deeptech “champions”
The EIC (which has an overall budget of €10bn) will offer the selected companies support with fundraising, leadership mentoring, corporate partnership identification and matchmaking, media visibility, recruitment, and more. The aim of the programme is to build up to 120 deeptech “champions.”
“Time is of the essence when building category leaders in the deeptech sector, and our goal is to accelerate our company members on their scaleup journey,” co-founder and group managing director of Tech Tour, coordinator of the EIC Scaling Club, William Stevens said.
A full list of companies chosen for the programme can be found here. None of them seem focused on researching the actual Multiverse though, so I will have to disappoint Angelina the next time we meet.