Quantum computing company D-Wave Systems announced today that it raised a $29 million (CAD) round of funding in late 2014.
This follows the $28.4 million it brought in last summer and ~$2.2 million raised in November. The round brought in cash from several previous investors and a “large institutional investor” that D-Wave declined to name in its release or in follow-up emails.
The new funding gives D-Wave more room to expand its hardware and software efforts. On the processor side of things, the company is developing its next-gen 1,000 qubit system, which should have an easier time of demonstrating the benefits of using quantum computing than its 512 qubit predecessor.
If it hopes to sell any more processors, D-Wave Systems also needs clients like Google and NASA to build software that takes advantage of quantum annealing. That’s uncharted territory for most software engineers, so D-Wave has to work with its customers to demonstrate that there is in fact an advantage to buying quantum hardware.
While it holds the title of first-to-market, D-Wave is no longer the only quantum hardware company in town. Last summer, Y Combinator-backed Rigetti Computing raised $2.5 million for its own commercial quantum-computing platform.