Ukrainian-American startup Haiqu, which develops software for quantum computers, has raised $11 million in a seed funding round. The company announced the news on January 13. The round was led by U.S.-based Primary Venture Partners. Other participants included Qudit Investments, led by former AT&T CEO John Donovan, Alumni Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Silicon Roundabout Ventures, Angel One Fund, as well as existing investors Toyota Ventures and MaC Venture Capital.
The company plans to use the funds to accelerate the market launch of the Haiqu operating system, expand its team, and further develop its product offering. In particular, Antonio May, a former Microsoft Quantum employee, has recently joined the team as Chief Product Manager. The startup will also focus on further validating practical applications of quantum computing in finance, healthcare, aviation, chemistry, and other industries, as well as on expanding its Early Access Program for researchers and companies.
Haiqu CEO and co-founder Richard Givan notes that low-level software, or middleware, may seem invisible, but it plays a critical role in enabling the transition from demonstration experiments to truly powerful algorithms capable of operating at real scale.
According to CTO and co-founder Mykola Maksymenko, the main challenge facing modern quantum computers lies not so much in the number of qubits as in the high cost of computation, system fragility, and the difficulty of reproducing experimental results. Haiqu aims to address these issues by enabling researchers and developers to run high-quality, reproducible experiments quickly and without excessive costs — within a reasonable budget.
Investors emphasize that for quantum computing to become commercially viable compared to classical computing in at least one industry, software will play a decisive role.
Haiqu is a Ukrainian-American startup founded in 2022. Its founders are Richard Givan, a Stanford University graduate and the company’s CEO, and Mykola Maksymenko, a quantum physicist with experience at the Max Planck and Weizmann institutes, who serves as CTO. The company is developing a hardware-aware operating system and software stack for quantum computing that enables practical applications to be run today, reducing computational costs by hundreds of times compared to existing solutions.
In 2023, Haiqu raised $4 million in a pre-seed round from Toyota Ventures, MaC Venture Capital, SOMA Capital, u.ventures, SID Venture Partners, Roosh, and other investors.
