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Intel acquires SigOpt, a specialist in modeling optimization, to boost its AI business
Intel has been doubling down on building chips and related architecture for the next generation of computing, and today it announced an acquisition that will bolster its expertise and work specifically in one area of future technology: artificial intelligence.
The semiconductor giant today announced that it has acquired SigOpt, a startup out of San Francisco that has built an optimization platform that can be used to run modeling and simulations (two key applications of AI tech) in a better way. Anthony described SigOpt as a startup built to “optimize everything” when we covered its Series A, but Intel specifically will be integrating the tech into its AI business, specifically into its AI Analytics Toolkit, a spokesperson tells me.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but SigOpt already counted a number of large enterprises — “SigOpt’s customer base includes Fortune 500 companies across industries, as well as leading research institutions, universities and consortiums using its products” — among its customers. The product was still in a closed beta, however. Notably, it had raised money from an interesting group of investors that included In-Q-Tel (the firm associated with the CIA that makes strategic investments) and Andreessen Horowitz, and Y Combinator, among others. It had raised less than $10 million.
The plan will be to continue providing services to existing users, and to continue building out the company’s platform — co-founders Scott Clark (CEO) and Patrick Hayes (CTO) and their team are joining Intel.
“We will continue to work with SigOpt’s existing customers and will also integrate the technology into our product road map,” a spokesperson confirmed.
While Intel is working hard on streamlining its business around next-generation chips to better compete against the likes of Nvidia (which itself is growing substantially with the acquisition of ARM) and smaller players like GraphCore, in part by divesting more legacy operations, it seems a strong opportunity in providing services for its customers alongside those chips, and these services specifically will help customers with the compute loads that they will be running on those chips.
The focus for Intel has been on the next generation of computing to offset declines in its legacy operations. In the last quarter, even as it beat expectations, Intel reported a 3% decline in its revenues, led by a drop in its data center business. It said that it’s projecting the AI silicon market to be bigger than $25 billion by 2024, with AI silicon in the data center to be greater than $10 billion in that period.
In 2019, Intel reported some $3.8 billion in AI-driven revenue, but it hopes that tools like SigOpt’s will help drive more activity in that business, dovetailing with the push for more AI applications in a wider range of businesses.
“In the new intelligence era, AI is driving the compute needs of the future. It is even more important for software to automatically extract the best compute performance while scaling AI models,” said Raja Koduri, Intel’s chief architect and senior vice president of its discrete graphics division. “SigOpt’s AI software platform and data science talent will augment Intel software, architecture, product offerings and teams, and provide us with valuable customer insights. We welcome the SigOpt team and its customers to the Intel family.”
While there could potentially be a number of applications for SigOpt’s tech, this is a signal of how bigger players will continue to consolidate specific services around their bigger business, giving the small startup a much bigger horizon in terms of potential business (even if it is all tied to customers that only use Intel hardware).
“We are excited to join Intel and supercharge our mission to accelerate and amplify the impact of modelers everywhere. By combining our AI optimization software with Intel’s decades-long leadership in AI computing and machine learning performance, we will be able to unlock entirely new AI capabilities for modelers,” said Clark in a statement.
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Intel agrees to sell its NAND business to SK Hynix for $9 billion
SK Hynix, one of the world’s largest chip makers, announced today it will pay $9 billion for Intel’s flash memory business. Intel said it will use proceeds from the deal to focus on artificial intelligence, 5G and edge computing.
“For Intel, this transaction will allow us to to further prioritize our investments in differentiated technology where we can play a bigger role in the success of our customers and deliver attractive returns to our stockholders,” said Intel chief executive officer Bob Swan in the announcement.
The Wall Street Journal first reported earlier this week that the two companies were nearing an agreement, which will turn SK Hynix into one of the world’s largest NAND memory makers, second only to Samsung Electronics.
The deal with SK Hynix is the latest one Intel has made so it can double down on developing technology for 5G network infrastructure. Last year, Intel sold the majority of its modem business to Apple for about $1 billion, with Swan saying that the time that the deal would allow Intel to “[put] our full effort into 5G where it most closely aligns with the needs of our global customer base.”
Once the deal is approved and closes, Seoul-based SK Hynix will take over Intel’s NAND SSD and NAND component and wafer businesses, and its NAND foundry in Dalian, China. Intel will hold onto its Optane business, which makes SSD memory modules. The companies said regulatory approval is expected by late 2021, and a final closing of all assets, including Intel’s NAND-related intellectual property, will take place in March 2025.
Until the final closing takes places, Intel will continue to manufacture NAND wafers at the Dalian foundry and retain all IP related to the manufacturing and design of its NAND flash wafers.
As the Wall Street Journal noted, the Dalian facility is Intel’s only major foundry in China, which means selling it to SK Hynix will dramatically reduce its presence there as the United States government puts trade restrictions on Chinese technology.
In the announcement, Intel said it plans to use proceeds from the sale to “advance its long-term growth priorities, including artificial intelligence, 5G networking and the intelligent, autonomous edge.”
During the six-month period ending on June 27, 2020, NAND business represented about $2.8 billion of revenue for its Non-volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG), and contributed about $600 million to the division’s operating income. According to the Wall Street Journal, this made up the majority of Intel’s total memory sales during that period, which was about $3 billion.
SK Hynix CEO Seok-Hee Lee said the deal will allow the South Korean company to “optimize our business structure, expanding our innovative portfolio in the NAND flash market segment, which will be comparable with what we achieved in DRAM.”
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Xometry raises $75M Series E to expand custom manufacturing marketplace
When companies need to find manufacturers to build custom parts, it’s not always an easy process, especially during a pandemic. Xometry, a seven-year-old startup based in Maryland, has built an online marketplace where companies can find manufacturers across the world with excess capacity to build whatever they need. Today, the company announced a $75 million Series E investment to keep expanding the platform.
T. Rowe Price Associates led the investment, with participation from new firms Durable Capital Partners LP and ArrowMark Partners. Previous investors also joined the round, including BMW i Ventures, Greenspring Associates, Dell Technologies Capital, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Foundry Group, Highland Capital Partners and Almaz Capital . Today’s investment brings the total raised to $193 million, according to the company.
Company CEO and co-founder Randy Altschuler says Xometry fills a need by providing a digital way of putting buyers and manufacturers together with a dash of artificial intelligence to put the right combination together. “We’ve created a marketplace using artificial intelligence to power it, and provide an e-commerce experience for buyers of custom manufacturing and for suppliers to deliver that manufacturing,” Altschuler told TechCrunch.
The kind of custom pieces that are facilitated by this platform include mechanical parts for aerospace, defense, automotive, robotics and medical devices — what Altschuler calls mission-critical parts. Being able to put companies together in this fashion is particularly useful during COVID-19 when certain regions might have been shut down.
“COVID has reinforced the need for distributed manufacturing and our platform enables that by empowering these local manufacturers, and because we’re using technology to do it, as COVID has unfolded […] and as continents have shut down, and even specific states in the United States have shut down, our platform has allowed customers to autocorrect and shift work to other locations,” he explained
What’s more, companies could take advantage of the platform to manufacture critical personal protective equipment. “One of the beauties of our platform was when COVID hit customers could come to our platform and suddenly access this tremendous amount of manufacturing capacity to produce this much-needed PPE,” he said.
Xometry makes money by facilitating the sale between the buyer and producer. They help set the price and then make money on the difference between the cost to produce and how much the buyer was willing to pay to have it done.
They have relationships with 5,000 manufacturers located throughout the world and 30,000 customers using the platform to build the parts they need. The company currently has around 350 employees, with plans to use the money to add more to keep enhancing the platform.
Altschuler says from a human perspective, he wants his company to have a diverse workforce because he never wants to see people being discriminated against for whatever reason, but he also says as a company with an international market, having a diverse workforce is also critical to his business. “The more diversity that we have within Xometry, the more we’re able to effectively market to those folks, sell to those folks and understand how they utilize technology. We’re just going to better understand our customer set as we [build a more diverse workforce],” he said.
As a Series E-stage company, Altschuler does not shy away from the IPO question. In fact, he recently brought in new CFO Jim Rallo, who has experience taking a company public. “The market that we operate in is so large, and there’s so many opportunities for us to serve both our customers and our suppliers, and we have to be great for both of them. We need capital to do that, and the public markets can be an efficient way to access that capital and to grow our business, and in the end that’s what we want to do,” he said.
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Your first sales hire should be a missionary, not a mercenary
Micah Smurthwaite is a partner at Next47 focusing on investments in enterprise software, infrastructure, cybersecurity and frontier technology companies.
As the first sales hire at Cloudflare, I learned firsthand from both our high growth and my own mistakes how to build a world-class sales team. Early hires are the cultural cornerstones of an organization. As Vinod Khosla described the initial hires at Sun Microsystems, “Initial hiring is way more important than you think because of its multiplicative effect. So, it’s worth taking a little longer when you hire those people.”
The first sales hire will set the best practices, cultural tone and is responsible for making sure each subsequent new sales hire succeeds. For this reason, it is important that startups look to hire missionaries, not mercenaries, when they bring on their first sales team member. If the first sales hire is a “coin-operated” mercenary whose priority is to overachieve quota and is a great solo player, they may be more competitive than collaborative. In contrast, if the first hire is a missionary who cares more about evangelizing the product and is a team player, they will naturally enable the next set of hires to succeed.
Hiring the missionary
There is an overwhelming amount of declarative advice on how to make your first sales hire: They should have experience selling at an early-stage company, tenure in that company to a much larger team (five to 50 employees, or $100,000 to $10 million ARR), they’ve sold at your price point, overachieved quota consistently (beware of this one. Quota overachievement can be a false positive and may be the result of a fruitful territory, a comp plan where quotas were too low or selfish “me-first” behavior.), etc. What you should look for are missionaries, and they exhibit two key qualities: resourceful ingenuity and team-based behavior.
Missionaries are resourceful team players
At early-stage startups, there is more work to do than people to do it. These are resource-constrained environments where roles go beyond job descriptions and are “jack-of-all-trades” positions. This first sales hire is not an ordinary sales gig. It requires a missionary with a deep interest in the technology who wants to evangelize the product. The resourceful missionary must have an enterprising mindset to build their own sales collateral, a clever approach for testing pricing, a passion for the product technology and an ability to navigate the organization so engineering and product teams can hear the voice of the customer.
While resourceful skills are needed to test out different sales motions, the most important quality the missionary must have is a team-first attitude to share those learnings with colleagues. As the missionary, and the subsequent missionary hires, are developing a repeatable process they are engaging in novel intellectual work; this is not routine execution. When someone develops better messaging, or discovers a new use case, the goal is to spread that expertise so overall collective intelligence and team performance increases. If that operational know-how becomes siloed and an individual optimizes for themselves, instead of the team, the organization loses.
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Wendell Brooks has resigned as president of Intel Capital
When Wendell Brooks was promoted to president of Intel Capital, the investment arm of the chip giant, in 2015, he knew he had big shoes to fill. He was taking over from Arvind Sodhani, who had run the investment component for 28 years since its inception. Today, the company confirmed reports that Brooks has resigned that role.
“Wendell Brooks has resigned from Intel to pursue other opportunities. We thank Wendell for all his contributions and wish him the best for the future,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch in a rather bland send off.
Anthony Lin, who has been leading mergers and acquisitions and international investing, will take over on an interim basis. Interestingly, when Brooks was promoted, he too was in charge of mergers and acquisitions. Whether Lin keeps that role remains to be seen.
When I spoke to Brooks in 2015 as he was about to take over from Sodhani, he certainly sounded ready for the task at hand. “I have huge shoes to fill in maintaining that track record,” he said at the time. “I view it as a huge opportunity to grow the focus of organization where we can provide strategic value to portfolio companies.”
In that same interview, Brooks described his investment philosophy, saying he preferred to lead, rather than come on as a secondary investor. “I tend to think the lead investor is able to influence the business thesis, the route to market, the direction, the technology of a startup more than a passive investor,” he said. He added that it also tends to get board seats that can provide additional influence.
Comparing his firm to traditional VC firms, he said they were as good or better in terms of the investing record, and as a strategic investor brought some other advantages as well. “Some of the traditional VCs are focused on a company-building value. We can provide strategic guidance and complement some of the company building over other VCs,” he said.
Over the life of the firm, it has invested $12.9 billion in more than 1,500 companies, with 692 of those exiting via IPO or acquisition. Just this year, under Brooks’ leadership, the company has invested $225 million so far, including 11 new investments and 26 investments in companies already in the portfolio.
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In-game app-development platform Overwolf acquires CurseForge assets from Twitch to get into mods
Overwolf, the in-game app-development toolkit and marketplace, has acquired Twitch’s CurseForge assets to provide a marketplace for modifications to complement its app development business.
Since its launch in 2009, developers have used Overwolf to build in-game applications for things like highlight clips, game-performance monitoring and metrics, and strategic analysis. Some of these developers have managed to earn anywhere between $100,000 and $1 million per year off revenue from app sales.
“CurseForge is the embodiment of how fostering a community of creators around games generates value for both players and game developers,” said Uri Marchand, Overwolf’s chief executive officer, in a statement. “As we move to onboard mods onto our platform, we’re positioning Overwolf as the industry standard for building in-game creations.”
It wouldn’t be a stretch to think of the company as the Roblox for applications for gamers, and now it’s moving deeper into the gaming world with the acquisition of CurseForge. As the company makes its pitch to current CurseForge users — hoping that the mod developers will stick with the marketplace, they’re offering to increase by 50% the revenue those developers will make.
Overwolf said it has around 30,000 developers who have built 90,000 mods and apps, on its platform already.
As a result of the acquisition, the CurseForge mod manager will move from being a Twitch client and become a standalone desktop app included in Overwolf’s suite of app offerings, and the acquisition won’t have any effect on existing tools and services.
“We’ve been deeply impressed by the level of passion and collaboration in the CurseForge modding community,” said Tim Aldridge, director of Engineering, Gaming Communities at Twitch. “CurseForge is an incredible asset for both creators and gamers. We are confident that the CurseForge community will thrive under Overwolf’s leadership, thanks to their commitment to empowering developers.”
The acquisition comes two years after Overwolf raised $16 million in a round of financing from Intel Capital, which had also partnered with the company on a $7 million fund to invest in app and mod developers for popular games.
“Overwolf’s position as a platform that serves millions of gamers, coupled with its partnership with top developers, means that Intel’s investment will convert into more value for PC gamers worldwide,” said John Bonini, VP and GM of VR, Esports and Gaming at Intel, in a statement at the time. “Intel has always prioritized gamers with high performance, industry-leading hardware. This round of investment in Overwolf advances Intel’s vision to deliver a holistic PC experience that will enhance the ways people interact with their favorite games on the software side as well.”
Other investors in the company include Liberty Technology Venture Capital, the investment arm of the media and telecommunications company, Liberty Media.
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Arm’s financials and the blurring future of the semiconductor sector
Amidst the blitz of SoftBank earnings news today comes the financials for all of SoftBank’s subsidiaries, which includes Arm Holdings, the most important chip design and research company in the world that SoftBank bought for $32 billion back in 2016. Arm produces almost all of the key designs for the chips that run today’s smartphones, including Apple’s A13 Bionic chip that powers its flagship iPhone. In all, 22.8 billion chips were shipped globally last year using Arm licenses according to SoftBank’s financials.
It’s a massively important company, and its finances show a complicated picture for itself — and the semiconductor industry at large.
We sat down with Arm Holding’s CEO Simon Segars last year to discuss the company’s growing appetite for ambitious research, fueled by SoftBank dollars and the bullish vision of the conglomerate’s chairman Masayoshi Son:
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Intel has invested $132M in 11 startups this year, on track for $300M-$500M in total
When it comes to corporate venture capital, semiconductor giant Intel has shaped up to be one of the most prolific and prescient investors in the tech world, with investments in 1,582 companies worldwide, and a tally of some 692 portfolio companies going public or otherwise exiting in the wake of Intel’s backing.
Today, the company announced its latest tranche of deals: $132 million invested in 11 startups. The deals speak to some of the company’s most strategic priorities currently and in the future, covering artificial intelligence, autonomous computing and chip design.
Many corporate VCs have been clear in drawing a separation between their activities and that of their parents, and the same has held for Intel. But at the same time, the company has made a number of key moves that point to how it uses its VC muscle to expand its strategic relationships and also ultimately expand through M&A. Just earlier this month, it acquired Moovit, an Intel Capital portfolio company, for $900 million (a deal that was knocked down to $840 million when accounting for its previous investment).
“Intel Capital identifies and invests in disruptive startups that are working to improve the way we work and live. Each of our recent investments is pushing the boundaries in areas such as AI, data analytics, autonomous systems and semiconductor innovation. Intel Capital is excited to work with these companies as we jointly navigate the current world challenges and as we together drive sustainable, long-term growth,” said Wendell Brooks, Intel senior vice president and president of Intel Capital, in a statement.
The tranche of deals come at a critical time in the worlds of startups and venture investing. Many are worried that the slowdown in the economy, precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, will mean a subsequent slowdown in tech finance. Intel says that it plans to invest between $300 million and $500 million in total this year, so this would go some way to refuting that idea, along with some of the other monster deals and big funds that we’ve written out in the last couple of months.
The list announced today doesn’t include specific investment numbers, but in some cases the startups have also announced the fundings themselves and given more detail on round sizes. These still, however, do not reveal Intel’s specific financial stakes.
Here’s the full list:
- Anodot uses machine learning to monitor business operations autonomously, covering areas like app performance, customer incidents and more. The idea is that using the platform to monitor for these incidents means detection and response time can be faster. The full $35 million round was announced back in April.
- Astera Labs is a fabless semiconductor startup focused on connectivity solutions for data-centric systems to remove performance bottlenecks in compute-intensive workloads in areas like AI. It announced its Series B of an undisclosed amount two weeks ago, and prior to this it had raised just over $6 million, according to PitchBook.
- Axonne develops next-generation high-speed automotive Ethernet network connectivity solutions for connected cars: addressing the issue of merging legacy or proprietary systems with the demands of advanced next-generation applications. Intel invested as part of a $9 million round that actually closed in March.
- Hypersonix uses big-data analytics to determine and predict customer demand for e-commerce, retail and hospitality customers. One of its customers is Amazon — which uses Hypersonix’s platform in its supply chain division. That may come as a surprise, but according to Hypersonix’s CEO, the e-commerce giant does not have dedicated analytics teams to serve every division in the company, so sometimes they do buy from third parties. The round was actually announced at the beginning of this month: an $11.5 million deal.
- KFBIO out of China is one of Intel’s biotechnology bets. The company has designed and built a digital pathology scanner, which aims to replace microscopes with its big data, cloud-based and AI-powered insights. The obvious connection and interest here for Intel is on the processor side, but potentially brings Intel into a sphere where it can flex its muscle around a range of AI and cloud computing applications as well. The deal was closed at the beginning of April and totals around $14.2 million.
- Lilt has built an AI-powered language translation platform, not to compete with the likes of Google Translate for consumers, but to help those with international-facing websites and apps localise their services more efficiently. The company announced its round today: a $25 million Series B led by Intel.
- MemVerge focuses on “in-memory” computing, an architecture that makes it easier to deploy heavy, data-centric applications. It closed its round of $24.5 million at the beginning of April, and while it’s always worked with Intel processors, Intel’s investment was not public until today.
- ProPlus Electronics, also out of China, is an electronic design automation (“EDA”) startup that speeds up chip design and fabrication for semiconductor companies manufacturing a variety of chips at scale. It closed its round also at the beginning of April. The exact amount was undisclosed except to note that it was in the “hundreds of millions of Chinese Yuan” (or tens of millions of U.S. dollars).
- Retrace is an under-the-radar dental data startup that uses AI to improve “dental decision making,” but according to its site seems also to focus on other healthcare areas. It’s not clear how big the round is or when it closed.
- Spectrum Materials out of China is another stealthy company that supplies gas and other materials to semiconductor makers.
- Xsight Labs based in Israel is building chipset designs to accelerate data-intensive workloads that you typically get with AI and analytical applications. Israel has a huge R&D centre focused on autonomous driving, one of the applications that’s going to demand a lot in processing power, so this looks like a clearly strategic bet. The company raised $25 million in February, but Intel was not disclosed in that round previously.
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Replacing plastic with plant pulp for sustainable packaging attracts a billionaire backer
In a small suburb of Melbourne, two entrepreneurs are developing a technology that could mean big changes for the packaging industry.
Stuart Gordon and Mark Appleford are the co-founders of Varden, a company that has developed a process to take the waste material from sugarcane and convert it into a paper-like packaging product with the functional attributes of plastic.
Their technology managed to grab the attention of — and $2.2 million in funding from — Horizons Ventures, the venture capital fund managing the money of Li Ka-shing, one of the world’s wealthiest men.
It’s an opportune time to launch a novel packaging technology, as the European Union has already instituted a ban on single-use plastic items, which will go into effect in 2021. Taking their lead, companies like Nestlé and Walmart have pledged to use only sustainable packaging for products beginning in 2025.
The environmental toll that packaging takes on the earth’s habitats is already a concern for many, and the urgency to find a solution is only mounting with consumers and businesses actually producing more waste in the rush to change consumer behavior and socially distance as a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic.
“I like technologies that focus on carbon reductions,” said Chris Liu, Horizons Ventures’ representative in Australia.
A longtime tech and product executive who had stints at Intel and Fjord, a digital design studio, Liu relocated to Australia recently and has actually taken himself off the grid.
Living in Western Australia, the climate emergency was brought directly to the top of Liu’s mind when the wildfires, which raged through the country, came within two kilometers of his new home.
For Mark Appleford, it wasn’t so much the fires as it was the garbage that kept washing up on the shores of his beloved beaches.
Over beers at a barbecue he began talking to his eventual co-founder, Stuart Gordon, about the environmental problem they’d solve if they had the ability to change things. They settled on plastics.
Working in Appleford’s laundry room they started developing the technology that would become Varden. That early laundry room-work in 2015 led to a small seed round and the company’s long slog to get an initial product in the hands of test customers.
Finagling some time with the New Zealand manufacturer Fisher and Paykel, the two co-founders put together an early prototype of their coffee pods made from sugarcane bagasse, a waste byproduct of the sugar feedstock.
“We worked backwards through customers to supply chain, which led us to material selection, which was something that would allow us to create a product that people understood,” said Gordon.
The production process has evolved to fit inside a 40-foot container that holds the firm’s machine, which takes agricultural waste and converts that waste into packaging.
Instead of using rollers like a paper mill, Varden’s technology uses a thermoform to mold the plant waste into a product that has the same properties as plastic.
It removes a complicated step that’s been essential to the current crop of bioplastics, which use bacteria to convert plant waste into plastic substitutes that are then sold to the industry.
“It looks like paper… you can tear it in half and it sounds like paper when you rip it, and you can throw it in the bin,” said Appleford.
Gordon said that the company’s containers are outperforming commodity based plastics. And the first target for replacement, the founders said, is coffee capsules.
“We went for coffee because it’s the hardest,” said Appleford.
It’s also a huge market, according to the company. Varden estimates there are more than 20 billion coffee pods consumed every year.
With the new money, Varden will begin manufacturing at scale to meet initial demand from pilot customers and is hoping to expand its product line to include medical blister packs in addition to the coffee pods.
“A pilot plant on the products we’re looking at is a pilot plant that can generate 20 million units a year,” said Gordon.
Both men are hoping that their product — and others like it — can usher in a generation of new sustainable packaging materials that are better for the environment at every stage of their life cycle.
“The next generation of packaging will be better… there are plant-based flexibles for your salads, for your potato chips… [But] the next generation of molded packaging is us… bioplastic will ultimately go.”
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Quantum Machines raises $17.5M for its Quantum Orchestration Platform
Quantum Machines, a Tel Aviv-based startup that is building both hardware and software to operate quantum computers, today announced that it has raised a $17.5 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Israeli tech entrepreneur Avigdor Willenz (who, among other companies, co-founded Habana Labs and Anapurna Labs and sold them to Intel and Amazon, respectively) and Harel Insurance Investments.
TLV Partners and Battery Ventures also participated in this round. TLV Partners also led the company’s $5.5 million seed round in 2018, in which Battery Partners also participated.
“The race to commercial quantum computers is one of the most exciting technological challenges of our generation,” said Willenz. “Our goal at [Quantum Machines] is to make this happen faster than anticipated and establish ourselves as a key player in this emerging industry.”
The company says it will use the new funding to accelerate the adoption of its Quantum Orchestration Platform. This platform went live earlier this year. What makes it unique is that it’s a combination of custom hardware, which the company designed itself, and software tools that can be used to control virtually any quantum processor. To control a quantum processor, you also need a powerful classical computer, but traditional computers are ill-suited for this task, Quantum Machines argues, and it’ll take specialized hardware for classical computing to harness the power of quantum computing and run complex algorithms on these machines.
“The classical layers of the quantum computer are the real unmet need. They are the bottleneck,” Quantum Machines co-founder Itamar Sivan told me when the platform launched. “We were really looking into what is holding the industry back. What are the things that we can do today to drive this industry forward, but that will also enable faster progress in the future. Since most of the focus in the last years has been devoted to quantum processors, it was only natural that you know we take on this challenge.”
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