Quanfluence, a startup focused on photonic quantum technology, has successfully raised $2 million in a seed funding round led by pi Ventures, with participation from Golden Sparrow, Reena Dayal, and additional investors.

According to a press release from Quanfluence, the money will be used to scale its near-term products, bring them to market, and advance research and development for its flagship quantum computer.

Quanfluence is a photonic quantum technology startup that was co-founded in 2021 by Sujoy Chakravarty, Ravi Mehta, Biman Chattopadhyay, Anil Prabhakar, Aditi Vaidya, and Sandeep Goyal. It’s hardware-based optimization solution enhances AI to improve decision-making capacity. Within the next five to six years, the company wants to develop a general-purpose, fault-tolerant quantum computer.

The Bengaluru-based company claims that it combines computational technology and optics to provide a solution that gets around issues with noise, scaling, complexity, hardware instability, and high-dimensional problems. This allows for scalability and energy efficiency without the drawbacks of traditional methods.

In order to address complex real-world optimization challenges like workforce scheduling, logistics, financial optimization and risk management, and delivery route optimization, Quanfluence plans to test a more advanced version that can process 10–25 million permutations. This version is expected to be released the following quarter.

Quanfluence claims to be powered by its optical Ising machine, which uses light waves as computational units, and to have 100x faster optimization technology. By manipulating these waves with sophisticated photonic circuits and combining them with fast field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), the system can process hundreds of interconnected variables at once. Approximately 10,000 permutations or 128 interconnected variables can be handled by their current system.