Q3 Qilimanjaro Progress & Plans Update

Hi Qilimanjaro friends!

This is José Ignacio Latorre, CEO of Qilimanjaro. I’d like to bring to you an update on the progress of our ambitious project. Let me divide the news and future plans in several sections.

Scientific Progress

We are very, very happy to let you know that Pol Forn-Diaz, our CTO has managed to cool down our dilution fridge to 15 mK. He also tested our cavity. We are presently cooling down our first qubit. The aim is to work on it, analyse its properties and manipulate it so as to achieve computational tasks with it. Pol got quite some help from Chris.

On the software part of our project, together with Artur García-Sáez, we posted in the arxiv a new paper on a substantial improvement of a quantum algorithm designed for optimization problems. This goes under the name of Adiabatically Assisted Variational Quantum Eigensolvers. We are currently adapting it to hardware platforms.

Let me also quote the paper by Alba Cervera-Lierta, a student of mine, who worked out the exact Ising model on the IBM Q Experience quantum computer (and got a prize to be mentioned later!).

Finally, our platform QIBO is out. You may check how to program using quantum logic on our virtual machine and compile to a number of available quantum platforms. Here, Artur García-Sáez and Stefano Carraza (affiliated at CERN/Milano) are carrying all the work.

Our team is also getting bigger. This year, 5 new students are joining our different research lines.

Prizes

All of our work is producing some very positive impact in the quantum scenario. In particular, Alba got an award from IBM for the best notebook program. My other PhD student, Carlos Bravo, was also selected among the top 10 best programs of the contest.

Carlos did get another prize by himself, that is one of the grants by people at Rigetti, the Unitary Fund.

Partnerships

We have been working in a big number of research and commercial partnerships. In particular, we made an agreement for collaboration with Zapata Computing. I foresee a good future for this powerful relation.

We also met and agreed on scientific partnerships with Qubit Protocol (Australia) and Entropia Labs (Singapore). Other partnerships are in progress.

We also act as advisors of a number of quantum initiatives. Firstly, we are working with the recently created Quantum Revolution Fund. We are also collaborating with different initiatives to generate quantum talent in Barcelona. Stay tuned for more exciting news!

Public investments

Qilimanjaro is emerging from our group of people in academia. Our research has been so far financed with public grants from different sources. We are happy to announce that Pol got a new 3 year grant. He was also awarded with a MIT-Càmara de Comerç grant.

At present, we are working on increasing our public financial support.

VC investors

Qilimanjaro has been approached by a number of VCs. It is clear that our public funding is insufficient to compete in the quantum race. In this sense, we are open to any form of financial boost for our research.

We had long, interesting talks with Pillar VC, Elaia Partners, Bosch VC and other funds. All of them are trying to figure out their best strategies for the disruption quantum revolution. They need to understand when is the right moment to invest, and on what quantum technologies that should include quantum computation as a broad subject as well as detailed enabling technologies.

ICO investors

We have also been in contact with a few ICO investors. The situation here is looking less optimistic than some months ago. Many investors are holding their horses. There is a lot of uncertainty on the evolution of cryptocurrencies.

Plans

At Qilimanjaro we want to do things right. It’s a complete madness to try to start the ICO without a some fundings that will support the project. Remember that we are building a quantum computer, which requires a lot of resources and very smart scientists. Without the proper backup, the ICO could move forward but we could be short in fundings after a few months.

For those reasons:

• We want to close first some fundings with a couple of VCs. Currently we are in close discussions with a couple of players and we do hope to raise a relevant budget for our project soon.
• We will move back the ICO up to Q1-Q2 of 2019. The token distribution will be done after the ICO takes place.
• We are going to keep working very forcefully on both science and business opportunities.
• We want to be sure that we can move forward this project. We want that every person that will invest, is going to see returns.

If you have any questions, we will be more than happy to answer them in Twitter/Telegram or Email.