Why we invested in Aliro Technologies

Today we’re excited to announce our investment in Aliro Technologies, a startup spun out of Harvard’s Quantum Information Sciences Lab that is seeking to democratize quantum computing and make the technology accessible to all users -- whether they are developers, coders, researchers, or hardware vendors.

We started Q Fund with the idea of looking for deep technologies that can have a huge impact on society. We began with artificial intelligence and are now actively looking into areas such as quantum computing.

We found that our core audience of top researchers is very similar in both AI and quantum computing. Both include a tight-knit group of exceptional minds who want to use technology to solve really big problems.

We believe quantum computing is going to fundamentally change the computing paradigm and radically impact many industries. But while quantum computing has existed for more than a decade, actual use is still very limited. We think that could all change, as Aliro’s software makes quantum computing as accessible as classical computing.

We first learned about the company when Ajay read a quantum chemistry paper referenced in an article and learned about Prineha Narang’s impressive background. After learning that Pri had co-founded a startup at Harvard, he reached out to the Harvard innovation lab to meet with her and the fantastic team at Aliro.

We liked the first-principles approach of the founding team, which built the technology behind Aliro while trying to solve a problem they themselves had in the lab. At the time, the founders couldn't find a program that could do efficient qubit mapping and realized that most of the quantum computing world was facing the same issue.

The result is software that has the potential to solve huge problems in the error-prone hardware era of the next five-to-10 years by either correcting or mitigating errors on these machines or helping developers to not have to worry about the underlying hardware that’s being used.

In a space where most of the companies we’ve seen are hardware-oriented, Aliro is building a general-purpose software compiler that will work with any hardware and any qubit type. This is not only technologically challenging to do, but it provides huge value to developers who shouldn't care about which hardware their code needs to run on optimally.

Congrats again to Pri, Jim, and the rest of the Aliro team!