I served on the board for 17 years (2003 – 2020) and posted memories on flickr along the way. D-Wave is the only company building quantum annealing and gate-model quantum computers, and the farthest along in commercial development (the most system sales and cloud customers). They also have the most qubits (>5000) and, if all goes well, will trade with the ticker QBTS.

When I first invested, 19 years ago, it was on a $2.5M pre-money valuation. It was our first investment in Canada too. In retrospect, I was a wee bit early, as there were no competing quantum computing startups for many years that followed, but today, I am so proud to see this late-blooming unicorn heading to the public markets! Last year, I introduced D-Wave to Emil Michael’s SPAC and made the initial pitch, as Gen and I have also known him for many years.

• Today’s Announcement
• My Flickr photoblog posts on D-Wave
• TD Ameritrade interview of CEO Alan Baratz.
• A video I took of Google’s first D-Wave machine, a couple years prior to the Reuters photo above. Google purchased one of every quantum computer D-Wave made for almost a decade.

One response to “CONGRATS to D-Wave for today’s announcement of going public!”

  1. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Roses Law from 2003 to 2020Scaling Quantum Computing: 17 Years of Rose's LawIn 2020, D-Wave announced the world’s first quantum computer with over 5,000 qubits (quantum bits). Qubit count is one of the metrics of a quantum computer’s computational power, which grows dramatically with the number of qubits. I have been tracking the frontier of quantum computing from the beginning, and this is the updated semi-log graph (where a straight line is an exponential curve). When I first invested in quantum computing in 2003, D-Wave founder Geordie Rose had one working qubit, and he predicted that he would be able to demonstrate a two-bit quantum computer within 6 months. There was a certain precision to his predictions. He went on to suggest that the number of qubits in a scalable quantum computing architecture should double every year. It sounded a lot like Gordon Moore’s prediction back in 1965, when he extrapolated from just five data points on a log-scale. So, I called it “Rose’s Law” and that seemed to amuse him.

    They have more Qubits deployed & more customer applications than everyone else combined. From their pitch deck: This is a wafer full of D-Wave quantum processors in 2018There are three different squares tiled across the wafer, with the same Washington architecture scaled to 500, 1000 and 2000 qubits. Each square chip is diced and connected via the wire bond pads that run along the periphery. It is then cooled to almost absolute zero (15 mili-Kelvin), and the niobium rings become superconductors in a state of quantum engagement. A Wafer of the Latest D-Wave Quantum ComputersThe rainbow of colors you see in these photos are iridescent thin-film effects, like a butterfly’s wing, and serve as a poetic complement to the mind-bending physics of these processors, which harness the refractive echoes across trillions of parallel universes to compute in a fundamentally different way from any classical computer.

    A display at D-Wave HQ in Canada back in 2018. The display shows the chip generations of "Rose’s Law" and the poster from 2014 was the first time a Canadian company was featured on the cover of TIME The D-Wave Orion processor from 2012. It is in our main conference room at Future Ventures, detailsD-Wave Orion

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