Monthly Archives: June 2020

An ambitious plan to build a quantum computer the size of a soccer field could soon become a reality. A startup founded by the researchers behind the idea has just come out of stealth with $4.5 million in funding.

While there has been some headline-grabbing progress in quantum computing in recent yearsnot least Googles announcement that it had achieved quantum supremacy todays devices are still a long way from being put to practical use.

The reason quantum computers are so promising is their potential to solve problems beyond the reach of even the most powerful supercomputers. While bits in a conventional computer can only adopt the values of 1 or 0, the qubits at the heart of a quantum computer can adopt multiple combinations of 1 or 0 at the same time thanks to the quantum mechanical phenomena of superposition.

Another quantum phenomena called entanglement makes it possible to link many of these qubits together. The combination means that while a conventional computer would have to chug through the numbers sequentially, an ideal quantum computer could sort through every possible combination of 1s or 0s instantly.

Given their complexity, though, this is only useful for problems so big that it would take a conventional computer a very long time to work through. That requires a lot of qubits, far more than anyone has managed to string together so far. The superconducting qubits that industry leaders like Google, IBM, and D-Wave use are also noisy, so its expected that wed need even more qubits to carry out error-correction as well.

The difficulty of scaling up these devices is the reason why people often talk of decades before we see practical uses for quantum computers. But in 2017 researchers from the University of Sussex in the UK put forward a bold plan for a modular quantum computer that could quickly scale up to billions of qubits. And now a startup founded by the same team, called Universal Quantum, has come out of stealth with plans to commercialize the idea.

The company is taking a different tack to the market leaders, building its qubits out of trapped ionscharged atoms confined in a particular spot using using electromagnetic fieldsrather than the superconducting circuits that have become the most popular solution in recent years.

Trapped ions are promising because they are all identical and therefore dont suffer from the tiny variations in fabrication that can impact superconducting circuits. Its also possible to push them into particular states and read those states back out with high fidelity. And most importantly, they are able to maintain their fragile quantum states for much longer than other approaches, which gives them more time to carry out calculations.

But combining large numbers of trapped ions in a single device while still maintaining control of them has proven tricky, and circuits made up of trapped ions are much slower than alternative technologies. Most designs so far also require individual lasers to control each qubit, which quickly gets impractical for devices with thousands if not millions of qubits.

Universal Quantum plans to get round this by using microwaves to control the qubits, relying on the same technology that is found in cell phones. They plan to build modular components of roughly 2,500 qubits which can then be linked together to create larger systems.

A downside to this modular approach is that the links between modules can be far slower than the quantum operations going on inside them, even using optical links that run at the speed of light. The company plans to get around this by instead shuttling the ions themselves around the system.

While they havent set any kind of timeline for when they might have a working device up and running, the founders of Universal Quantum told the BBC they are confident the technical capability exists to build the machine. The say the funds theyve raised so far will be used to find a site and key staff, but that theyll have to raise a lot more money to get the job done.

Betting against some of the largest and most powerful technology companies in the world is certainly a risky strategy. But if this plucky startup can pull off its vision, the quantum age may not be as distant as we think.

Image Credit: Winfried Hensinger

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A New Startup Intends to Build the World's First Large-Scale Quantum Computer - Singularity Hub

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Quantum computing has the promise to reshape industries by unleashing computing power well beyond what traditional computers have. Logistics, pharmaceuticals and financial services all stand to benefit from applying the new technology.

JPMorgan Chase (ticker: JPM) published data last week about one of its quantum-computing experiments demonstrating the banks growing expertise in that realm. The academic-style paper is a little Byzantine, but investors should pay attention, because they will be hearing more about quantum computing from other players, including Honeywell (HON), Microsoft (MSFT) and Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) in the near future.

In this paper, we present a novel, canonical way to produce a quantum oracle from an algebraic expression, the authors of the JPMorgan paper wrote. Thats a mouthful. Canonical, in this instance, appears to mean authoritative. And according to Microsoft, a quantum oracle is a is a black box operation that is used as input to another algorithm.

Microsofts definition only raises more questions and probably doesnt help many of the uninitiated, Barrons included. Classically, an oracle answers questions about the future. That isnt a bad analogy for quantum computing. The technology is mysterious and its power not completely understood by many peopleinvestors included.

The use of a quantum oracle, in this instance, makes doing complicated math with fibonacci numbers easier than with traditional computing systems. Fibonacci numbers form a sequence in which each number is the sum of the prior two. The sequences have applications in investing and information security, among other areas.

The Morgan team ran their experiment on the new Honeywell computer based on trapped-ion technology with quantum volume 64.

Honeywell has the hardware. And just before the JPMorgan paper was released, the industrial conglomerate announced it had created the worlds most powerful quantum computer, achieving a quantum volume of 64. Essentially, Honeywell has successfully tethered six q-bits, or quantum bits, together.

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Quantum volume is an industry term. The number 64 comes from 2 raised to the power of 6. A big reason quantum computers can do more is the q-bits can have two values at the same time. Six bits can have, essentially, 64 states at once. Quite frankly, its all a little confusing.

Today, quantum computers can still be beaten in most applications by traditional computers. But quantum power is growing. The first Wright brother flight went 600 meters, Christopher Savoie, founder and CEO of quantum computing firm Zapata Computing, said. He was explaining how to think of the current generation of quantum-computing technology. The Wright brothers flight happened in 1903 and by 1918 there were air forces around the globe.

Zapata partners with Honeywell to help develop quantum programs, applications and algorithms. Zapata helps with the software running on Honeywell hardware used by JPMorgan.

The capability of [quantum computing] is exponential, Savoie said. There is a hockey-stick-like pattern that develops as more q-bits are added to the system. It will be tough to find an area of human activity where this wont help.

It is a little mind bending. But paying attention early will give investors an edge down the road.

JPMorgan stock was down more than 2% last week, worse than the 1.9% and 1% respective gains of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 over the same span. Honeywell shares gained 0.6% last week.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com

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JPMorgan Shows Its Chops in Quantum Computing. Heres Why It Matters. - Barron's

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)have announced their discovery ofintriguing new facts about a type of quasiparticle known as an exciton. The group's work serves to grasp the potential of transitional metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs). These atomically thin class of materials have attracted attention due to their electronic and optical properties.

The results of the work, published inNature Communications, focused on TMDCs, with an emphasis on the exciton, which is often produced through the energy of light and result when a negatively charged electron bonding with a hole particle carrying a positive charge.

The research team (headed by Rensselaer's Sufei Shi, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering), found that the interaction between electrons and holes within this atomically thin semiconductor material can be quite powerful. So much so that the electron and hole within the exciton can bond with a third particle, either an electron or a hole, to form a trion.

In the present study, Shi and his team succeeded in manipulating the TMDC material in a manner to cause the internal crystalline lattice to vibrate. This, in turn, served to create a phonon, which is another type of quasiparticle. The phonon was observed to interact strongly with a trion.

All solid crystals are built of atoms bound in repeatable three-dimensional lattices. The atoms themselves can be thought of as particles connected by springs. Phonons can be described as units of vibrational energy engendered by the atoms' oscillation within the crystalline structure.

The vibration generates mechanical waves that propagate through the material with specific momentum and energy. In terms of quantum mechanics, these waves can be treated as a particle, and that particle is our photon.

Just as a photon is a quantum of light or electromagnetic energy, the phonon is a quantum of mechanical, specifically vibrational energy.

The researchers placed the material within a powerful magnetic field. This allowed them to analyze the light emitted from the TMDCs from the phonon interaction, thus determining the effective mass of the electron and hole individually.

The result was surprising. The investigators have assumed that there would be symmetry in mass, but as described by Shi, the team found that the measurement was "significantly different."

As described by Professor Shi, knowledge of effective mass is a significant step forward. "We have developed a lot of knowledge about TMDCs now," Shi said. "But to design an electronic or optoelectronic device, it is essential to know the effective mass of the electrons and holes. This work is one solid step toward that goal."

There is today an acceleration of building things smaller, lighter, and ever more energy efficient. While Professor Shi's work at Rensselaer may not lead to off the shelf components in the near term, they point in a direction.

The direction is unmistakable.

We recently reported usingphotonicsto transfer information internally and between chips and howquantum-mechanical spinsare being used to convey information. Moore's Law may or may not have been overturned, but it may be losing its relevance. Its the heat generated by moving electrons that is rapidly becoming the limiting factor in electrical engineering, maybe even more so than the number of bits that can be held in a device of a given physical size.

For this reason, the various forms of quantum computing, not reliant on wandering electrons and their cost in power and heat, may well define our industry's future.

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Quasiparticles Found to Have a Critical Role in Future Applications for Quantum Computing and Memory Storage - News - All About Circuits

Quantum teleportation is an important step in improving quantum computing.

Beam me up is one of the most famous catchphrases from the Star Trek series. It is the command issued when a character wishes to teleport from a remote location back to the Starship Enterprise.

While human teleportation exists only in science fiction, teleportation is possible in the subatomic world of quantum mechanicsalbeit not in the way typically depicted on TV. In the quantum world, teleportation involves the transportation of information, rather than the transportation of matter.

Last year scientists confirmed that information could be passed between photons on computer chips even when the photons were not physically linked.

Now, according to new research from the University of Rochester and Purdue University, teleportation may also be possible between electrons.

In a paper published in Nature Communications and one to appear in Physical Review X, the researchers, including John Nichol, an assistant professor of physics at Rochester, and Andrew Jordan, a professor of physics at Rochester, explore new ways of creating quantum-mechanical interactions between distant electrons. The research is an important step in improving quantum computing, which, in turn, has the potential to revolutionize technology, medicine, and science by providing faster and more efficient processors and sensors.

Quantum teleportation is a demonstration of what Albert Einstein famously called spooky action at a distancealso known as quantum entanglement. In entanglementone of the basic of concepts of quantum physicsthe properties of one particle affect the properties of another, even when the particles are separated by a large distance. Quantum teleportation involves two distant, entangled particles in which the state of a third particle instantly teleports its state to the two entangled particles.

Quantum teleportation is an important means for transmitting information in quantum computing. While a typical computer consists of billions of transistors, called bits, quantum computers encode information in quantum bits, or qubits. A bit has a single binary value, which can be either 0 or 1, but qubits can be both 0 and 1 at the same time. The ability for individual qubits to simultaneously occupy multiple states underlies the great potential power of quantum computers.

Scientists have recently demonstrated quantum teleportation by using electromagnetic photons to create remotely entangled pairs of qubits.

Qubits made from individual electrons, however, are also promising for transmitting information in semiconductors.

Individual electrons are promising qubits because they interact very easily with each other, and individual electron qubits in semiconductors are also scalable, Nichol says. Reliably creating long-distance interactions between electrons is essential for quantum computing.

Creating entangled pairs of electron qubits that span long distances, which is required for teleportation, has proved challenging, though: while photons naturally propagate over long distances, electrons usually are confined to one place.

In order to demonstrate quantum teleportation using electrons, the researchers harnessed a recently developed technique based on the principles of Heisenberg exchange coupling. An individual electron is like a bar magnet with a north pole and a south pole that can point either up or down. The direction of the polewhether the north pole is pointing up or down, for instanceis known as the electrons magnetic moment or quantum spin state. If certain kinds of particles have the same magnetic moment, they cannot be in the same place at the same time. That is, two electrons in the same quantum state cannot sit on top of each other. If they did, their states would swap back and forth in time.

The researchers used the technique to distribute entangled pairs of electrons and teleport their spin states.

We provide evidence for entanglement swapping, in which we create entanglement between two electrons even though the particles never interact, and quantum gate teleportation, a potentially useful technique for quantum computing using teleportation, Nichol says. Our work shows that this can be done even without photons.

The results pave the way for future research on quantum teleportation involving spin states of all matter, not just photons, and provide more evidence for the surprisingly useful capabilities of individual electrons in qubit semiconductors.

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Is teleportation possible? Yes, in the quantum world - University of Rochester

Quantum teleportation is an important step in improving quantum computing.

Beam me up is one of the most famous catchphrases from the Star Trek series. It is the command issued when a character wishes to teleport from a remote location back to the Starship Enterprise.

While human teleportation exists only in science fiction, teleportation is possible in the subatomic world of quantum mechanicsalbeit not in the way typically depicted on TV. In the quantum world, teleportation involves the transportation of information, rather than the transportation of matter.

Last year scientists confirmed that information could be passed between photons on computer chips even when the photons were not physically linked.

Now, according to new research from the University of Rochester and Purdue University, teleportation may also be possible between electrons.

A quantum processor semiconductor chip is connected to a circuit board in the lab of John Nichol, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Rochester. Nichol and Andrew Jordan, a professor of physics, are exploring new ways of creating quantum-mechanical interactions between distant electrons, promising major advances in quantum computing. Credit: University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster

In a paper published in Nature Communications and one to appear in Physical Review X, the researchers, including John Nichol, an assistant professor of physics at Rochester, and Andrew Jordan, a professor of physics at Rochester, explore new ways of creating quantum-mechanical interactions between distant electrons. The research is an important step in improving quantum computing, which, in turn, has the potential to revolutionize technology, medicine, and science by providing faster and more efficient processors and sensors.

Quantum teleportation is a demonstration of what Albert Einstein famously called spooky action at a distancealso known as quantum entanglement. In entanglementone of the basic of concepts of quantum physicsthe properties of one particle affect the properties of another, even when the particles are separated by a large distance. Quantum teleportation involves two distant, entangled particles in which the state of a third particle instantly teleports its state to the two entangled particles.

Quantum teleportation is an important means for transmitting information in quantum computing. While a typical computer consists of billions of transistors, called bits, quantum computers encode information in quantum bits, or qubits. A bit has a single binary value, which can be either 0 or 1, but qubits can be both 0 and 1 at the same time. The ability for individual qubits to simultaneously occupy multiple states underlies the great potential power of quantum computers.

Scientists have recently demonstrated quantum teleportation by using electromagnetic photons to create remotely entangled pairs of qubits.

Qubits made from individual electrons, however, are also promising for transmitting information in semiconductors.

Individual electrons are promising qubits because they interact very easily with each other, and individual electron qubits in semiconductors are also scalable, Nichol says. Reliably creating long-distance interactions between electrons is essential for quantum computing.

Creating entangled pairs of electron qubits that span long distances, which is required for teleportation, has proved challenging, though: while photons naturally propagate over long distances, electrons usually are confined to one place.

In order to demonstrate quantum teleportation using electrons, the researchers harnessed a recently developed technique based on the principles of Heisenberg exchange coupling. An individual electron is like a bar magnet with a north pole and a south pole that can point either up or down. The direction of the polewhether the north pole is pointing up or down, for instanceis known as the electrons magnetic moment or quantum spin state. If certain kinds of particles have the same magnetic moment, they cannot be in the same place at the same time. That is, two electrons in the same quantum state cannot sit on top of each other. If they did, their states would swap back and forth in time.

The researchers used the technique to distribute entangled pairs of electrons and teleport their spin states.

We provide evidence for entanglement swapping, in which we create entanglement between two electrons even though the particles never interact, and quantum gate teleportation, a potentially useful technique for quantum computing using teleportation, Nichol says. Our work shows that this can be done even without photons.

The results pave the way for future research on quantum teleportation involving spin states of all matter, not just photons, and provide more evidence for the surprisingly useful capabilities of individual electrons in qubit semiconductors.

References:

Conditional teleportation of quantum-dot spin states by Haifeng Qiao, Yadav P. Kandel, Sreenath K. Manikandan, Andrew N. Jordan, Saeed Fallahi, Geoffrey C. Gardner, Michael J. Manfra and John M. Nichol, 15 June 2020, Nature Communications.DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16745-0

Coherent multi-spin exchange in a quantum-dot spin chain by Haifeng Qiao, Yadav P. Kandel, Kuangyin Deng, Saeed Fallahi, Geoffrey C. Gardner, Michael J. Manfra, Edwin Barnes, John M. Nichol, Accepted 12 May 2020, Physical Review X.arXiv: 2001.02277

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Teleportation Is Indeed Possible At Least in the Quantum World - SciTechDaily

Paris, 23 June 2020 Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, extends its portfolio of quantum solutions with Atos QLM Enhanced (Atos QLM E), a new GPU-accelerated range of its Atos Quantum Learning Machine (Atos QLM) offer, the world's highest-performing commercially available quantum simulator. Offering up to 12 times more computation speed, AtosQLME paves the way to optimized digital quantum simulation on the first, intermediate-scale quantum computers to be commercialized in the next few years (called NISQ - Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum).

By promising to apply, in the near-term, computation capabilities that are beyond the reach of even the most powerful existing computers to solve complex, real-life problems, NISQ devices will play an important role in determining the commercial potential of quantum computing. Herein lies a double challenge for the industry: developing NISQ-optimized algorithms is as important as building the machines, since both are required to identify concrete applications.

Integrating NVIDIAs V100S PCIe GPUs, Atos QLM E has been optimized to drastically reduce the simulation time of hybrid classical-quantum algorithms simulations, leading to quicker progress in application research. It will allow researchers, students and engineers to leverage some of the most promising variational algorithms (like VQE or QAOA) to further explore models fostering new drugs discovery, tackling pollution with innovative materials or better anticipation of climate change and severe weather phenomena, etc.

Bob Sorensen, Chief Analyst for Quantum Computing at Hyperion Research, said: Atos continues to play a key role in the advancement of the quantum computing sector by offering yet another world-class digital quantum simulator with increasingly powerful capabilities, this time through the inclusion of leading-edge NVIDIA GPUs. This latest Atos QLM offering uses a quantum hardware agnostic architecture that is well suited to support faster development of new quantum systems and related architectures as well as new and innovative quantum algorithms, architectures, and use cases. Since launching the first commercially available quantum system in 2017, Atos has concentrated its efforts on helping an increasing base of users better explore a wide range of practical business and scientific applications, a critical requirement for the overall advancement and long-term viability of the quantum computing sector writ large. The launch of the Atos QLM E is an exciting step for Atos but also for its clients and potential new end users, both of whom could benefit from access to these leading-edge digital quantum simulation capabilities.

Agns Boudot, Senior Vice President, Head of HPC & Quantum at Atos, explained: We are proud to help imagine tomorrows quantum applications. As we are entering the NISQ era, the search for concrete problems that can be solved by quantum computing technologies becomes critical, as it will determine the role they will play in helping society shape a better future. Combining unprecedented simulation performances and a programming and execution environment for hybrid algorithms, Atos QLM E represents a major step towards achieving near time breakthroughs

Atos QLM E is available in six configurations, ranging from 2 to 32 NVIDIA V100S PCIe GPUs. Atos QLM customers have the possibility to upgrade to Atos QLM E at any moment.

The Atos QLM user community continues to grow. Launched in 2017, this platform is being used in numerous countries worldwide includingAustria, Finland, France,Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Senegal,UKand theUnited States, empowering major research programs in various sectors like industry or energy. Atos ambitious program to anticipate the future of quantum computing the Atos Quantum program was launched in November 2016. As a result of this initiative,Atos was the first organization to offer a quantum noisy simulation module within its Atos QLM offer.

***

About AtosAtos is a global leader in digital transformation with 110,000 employees in 73 countries and annual revenue of 12 billion. European number one in Cloud, Cybersecurity and High-Performance Computing, the Group provides end-to-end Orchestrated Hybrid Cloud, Big Data, Business Applications and Digital Workplace solutions. The Group is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic & Paralympic Games and operates under the brands Atos, Atos|Syntel, and Unify. Atos is a SE (Societas Europaea), listed on the CAC40 Paris stock index.

The purpose of Atos is to help design the future of the information space. Its expertise and services support the development of knowledge, education and research in a multicultural approach and contribute to the development of scientific and technological excellence. Across the world, the Group enables its customers and employees, and members of societies at large to live, work and develop sustainably, in a safe and secure information space.

Press contact

Marion Delmas | marion.delmas@atos.net | +33 6 37 63 91 99 |

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Atos takes the most powerful quantum simulator in the world to the next level with Atos QLM E - GlobeNewswire

The camera crew was given full access to Earnest-Nobles research. In several scenes, Earnest-Noble is suited up in white PPE in the Pritzker Nanofabrication Facility in the Eckhardt Research Center. His scientific process and the breakthrough he seeks are depicted with animations and close-up footage of the state-of-the-art facilities. The filmmakers capture Earnest-Noble in the midst of a failed attempt or among his graveyard of failed quantum devices. As he embraces his doubts and is propelled by tenacity, viewers witness an emotional depiction of real science.

Earnest-Nobles lively interviews focus on the experience versus the result of his labors, providing a realistic portrayal of graduate studies and enabling viewers to follow him to his goal of identifying the ideal qubit for superpositiona phenomenon in quantum mechanics in which a particle can exist in several states at once.

When we were filming, I was trying to explain a qubit or something, and how much I was using jargon words was eye-opening to me. It helped me appreciate the challenge of making science understandable, said Earnest-Noble, who is now a quantum computing researcher at IBM. Science is a process far more than a series of facts. That became clear to me from working on this project.

Science communications typically takes a very long struggle of discovery and wraps it up into a pretty package, said Schuster. But something I found very special in this story is that you got to follow Nate for a couple of years. It accurately captured what Nates experience was like. And it focused on his experience, and not on the result, which is pretty amazing."

STAGEs director of science Sunanda Prabhu-Gaunkar originally joined the STAGE lab as a postdoc, and taught herself filmmaking in order to create the series. The scientific process inspires our filmmaking, she said. The workflow embraces failure, remains receptive to discoveries through iteration, and allows for risk-taking, all within a highly collaborative process.

Ellen Askey, the pilot episodes co-director, joined the project as a first-year student at UChicago with prior filmmaking experience. She worked on the series across her college career, graduating in June with a degree in cinema and media studies. Showing a story develop over time can be powerful, she said. We hope to get it out there to a lot of people who are and who are not yet interested in science.

Interested attendees can register through Eventbrite.

Adapted from an article by Maureen McMahon posted on the Physical Sciences Division website.

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Docuseries takes viewers into the lives and labs of scientists - UChicago News

AutomotiveBattery breakthroughs

Volkswagen invested a further $200m into QuantumScape, a US startup developing solid-state batteries. Volkswagen had already invested $100m in the company, and owned a 5% stake, but is now making a bigger bet in the technology which promises to last longer and charge faster than the current generation of batteries.

Solid-state batteries are more expensive than current lithium-ion ones, but Volkswagen and QuantumScope have plans to set up a pilot factory to investigate how to ramp up industrial-scale production.

Meanwhile, researchers at Brown University have discovered a way to use graphene to increase the toughness of solid-state batteries.

Enel, Europes largest utility, is set to launch a hydrogen business next year. The move comes just as Germany earmarked 9bn to expand its hydrogen capacity and the EU is expected this week to launch a hydrogen strategy with aims to turn this into a 140bn industry by 2030. There is a good summary of the state of play in this Petroleum Economist article.

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Santander InnoVentures led the $40m Series D funding round into Upgrade Inc, the US mobile bank.

Spanish insurer Mutua Madrilea and Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, corporate venture capital of Liberty Mutual Insurance, took part in the 4.47m Series A funding round for SingularCover, a startup offering personalised insurance for small businesses and freelancers.

Not all healthcare startups are booming. Proteus Digital Health, whose investors include Novartis Venture Fund, filed for bankruptcy. The startup makes pills with sensors that can monitor whether patients have taken them or not.

Medication adherence i.e. getting patients to take pills as prescribed is a huge problem in medicine. But it seems Proteus solution was expensive and patients didnt react well to the idea of swallowing monitoring devices.

Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund was one of the investors in the $4.5m seed funding round for DiogenX, a French biotech company developing a drug that could potentially regenerate insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells in type-1 diabetics.

It is one of many approaches being pushed forward to help manage the disease better. We recently wrote about a nanofibre teabag that could be used to implant pancreatic cells in diabetic patients.

Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund was also an investor in Belgian biotech eTheRNA, which is developing a vaccine for Covid-19 and recently picked up a 34m Series B funding round. The company uses messenger RNA to develop the vaccine, an approach that is emerging as a front-runner in the race to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.

Healthtech initial public offerings are still going strong. Repare Therapeutics, a precision oncology company backed by Bristol-Myers Squibb and Celgene, and Forma Therapeutics, a Novartis and Eli Lilly-backed company developing therapeutics to treat rare hematologic diseases and cancers both launched successful IPOs.

C4 Therapeutics, which is backed by Roche, Novartis and Kraft Group, raised $170m to start human testing for its treatments that use cells own natural recycling mechanisms to combat diseases.

BNP Paribas Dveloppement was one of the investors putting in a total of $9m into Linkfluence, the French social media listening company. Linkfluence uses natural language processing and image recognition to monitor consumer responses to brands.

Swedish music sampling service Tracklib has raised $4.5m from investors including the Sony Innovation Fund. Artists who have used Tracklibs 100,000+ catalogue of sample-friendly music to create their songs include Lil Wayne, DJ Khaled, Phantogram, Mary J. Blige and J. Cole.

IonQ, the quantum computing startup, extended its Series B funding round with an additional $7m, bringing the total invested in the company to $84m. Lockheed Martin and Robert Bosch Venture Capital were among the new investors.

IonQ is developing a version of quantum computing based on ions suspended in a vacuum by electromagnets. Many of the other quantum computing projects have gone for superconducting qubits that need to be cooled to near absolute zero, but IonQs trapped ion technology has the advantage it can run at room temperature.

Bosch and Lockheed Martin have both made a number of investments in quantum computing. Bosch invested in quantum software company Zapata last year.

Purplebricks and Axel Springer were among investors putting a further 40m into Homeday, the German real estate broker.

Microsofts M12 and Siemens Next47 investment arm took part in the $30m Series B funding round for Wandelbots, the German robotics startup that allows industrial robots to be taught tasks without the need to write code.

The Covid-19 pandemic is causing demand for robots to surge, and the cost of robots has been coming down dramatically over the past decade. However, the time and effort needed for coding robots has still put them out of reach for many users. A no-code robot could pave the way for much broader adoption.

SLAMcore, a UK startup developing spatial awareness algorithms for robots and drones, raised $5m from investors including Toyota AI Ventures.

Red Elctrica de Espaa, which runs the national grid in Spain, was one of the investors in the $5m funding round for CounterCraft, a US-based cybersecurity company that turns the tables and counterattacks cyber attackers.

Kristin Aamodt isleaving Equinor Technology Ventures

Nerida Scotthas been appointed Johnson & Johnsons new head of innovation for EMEA, based in London

Innovation manager, a growing fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) business specialising in the petcare sector, Hertfordshire, UK

Director of consulting Global Hybrid Agency, London, UK

VP strategy, Huge (agency), London, UK

Strategy director, R/GA, Berlin, Germany

Strategic business developer, New Solutions & Propositions, Vattenfall (energy), Stockholm, Sweden

Director of AI, Nordic countries, Huawei, Stockholm, Sweden

A fascinating look at how the way we cook and eat is changing by Fast Company. A huge number of new terms will have to be coined for this. Welcome to edu-cooking and the groceraunt.

Research from McKinsey suggests that innovation is indeed drying up at companies as other priorities take up executive brainspace. Focus on innovation is down in every industry except for healthcare.

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Corporate innovation weekly: the rise of hydrogen - Sifted