As 2023 is already here, we want to look back at Qilimanjaro’s journey through 2022, highlighting our work, participation in scientific and business events, projects and the latest achievements.
We started the year at full speed by being nominated in StartUS insights report on the Quantum Computing startups as one of the top 5 companies with real potential to impact the quantum computing industry in 2022. This gave us the right motivation at a pivotal point in the beginning of the year when all roadmaps are marked for the upcoming year. And predictions were rightfully made.
Our mission as a quantum computing company remains to bring to the market scalable app-specific fully quantum processors and algorithmic services in an accelerated time frame.
We celebrated our 3rd anniversary in May and, as a young company, 2022 has been very fruitful. One of our main objectives has been reached with the inauguration of Qilimanjaro’s second laboratory featuring a QINU fridge, and thus complementing our first lab with Bluefors. This built a strong base for our team and our annealing advances, along with the enlargement of the Hardware team with a new senior member and several new junior researchers.
All along 2022, our scientific work has been presented at established scientific conferences in the Quantum Industry like the March Meeting (Chicago, USA), QIP (Pasadena, USA), the 2nd edition of Quantum Matter Conference (Barcelona), the ICTP Conference on Adiabatic Quantum Computing (Trieste, Italy), the SQA conference (Helsinki, Finland), the Quantum Technology Conference at CERN and the INQA Conference (London, UK), organized by the newest established International Network on Quantum Annealing. Qilimanjaro brought the work of all theoretical, hardware and software teams, proving once again that we advance much easier in our research as an integrated team.
Together with these scientific participations we have participated in many significant business conferences: from the 2022 Mobile World Congress, the Quantum Business Europe, the Quantum Latino, New Trends in Computational Chemistry, IEEE Quantum Week, the Barcelona Deep Tech Summit, the Puzzle X, Futuro Cuántico, and Future Trends Forum organized by Fundación Innovación Bankinter. We want to highlight the invitation received for the contribution to the McKinsey Technology Council this Fall.
One of the biggest recognitions for Qilimanjaro has been the award of the Best Deep Tech Startup in 2022 at the Barcelona Deep Tech Summit for our year-work on “developing fast-to market app-specific quantum computers with true quantum benefits” – Victor Canivell, Co-Founder Qilimanjaro.
Qilimanjaro’s projects and clients built our foundation and differentiated us from other quantum startups. In 2022 we continued our work as a contributor to the European Project AVaQUS, coordinated by our Chief Hardware Architect Pol Forn Diaz and started our contributions to the newly awarded CUCO project, subsidized by CDTI and Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation in 2021. Qilimanjaro’s focus in this project is to define classical and quantum computing metrics and benchmarks. This year, CUCO received a lot of exposure and recognition while winning the “Best digitization project in a large company” award at the the second edition of the D+I Innovation Awards from El Español.
A significant result of all these projects has been Qilimanjaro filing the first patents, work coming from the theory and hardware teams on “Computing qubit allocations using a quantum computer”, “ Methods and systems to detect the magnetic flux generated by a flux qubit” and “Computing qubit allocation using a quantum annealer”.
Without doubt our biggest asset is our team which has significantly grown this year, mostly for the established successful internship program, starting with our 10 summer interns – 4 for the hardware team, 4 for the software team and 2 for the theory team. The students came from leading universities like University of Barcelona, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Polytechnic University of Barcelona, TU Delft, ETH Zurich; two students came from the Master in Quantum Science and Technology in Barcelona. Two of our co-founders actively contribute to teaching in this MSc as a means to bolster our quantum ecosystem.
We are also proud of our new collaborators from IFAE working at Qilimanjaro and also of our newly awarded Spanish grant Torres Quevedo for our senior quantum engineer team and our new Industrial Doctorates.
Qilimanjaro consolidated its work in 2022 with a new laboratory, new incorporations to our experienced team, new disruptive projects and constant participation in scientific and business conferences outlining our newest results and our vision for the quantum landscape.
A great year lies ahead, and the Qilimanjaro team is ready to climb the next step towards the objective of delivering true quantum advantage in targeted use cases to our users by 2024.
Last minute news: in the very last week of 2022, Qilimanjaro closed two major milestones: 1) its first seven-digit investment commitment, as well as 2) its second seven-digit client contract, in this case to deliver one of the first quantum computers ever delivered in Southern Europe (a second first-in-class, after the first one installed in the UAE in 2021).
More on this exciting news as we enter 2023!