Xanadu Quantum Technologies

Xanadu Quantum Technologies is a Canadian quantum computing hardware and software company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario. The company develops cloud accessible photonic quantum computers and develops open-source software for quantum machine learning and simulating quantum photonic devices.

History

Xanadu was founded in 2016 by Christian Weedbrook and was a participant in the Creative Destruction Lab's accelerator program. Since then, Xanadu has raised a total of US$245M in funding with venture capital financing from Bessemer Venture Partners, Capricorn Investment Group, Tiger Global Management, In-Q-Tel, Business Development Bank of Canada, OMERS Ventures, Georgian, Real Ventures, Golden Ventures and Radical Ventures and innovation grants from Sustainable Development Technology Canada and DARPA.

Xanadu's hardware efforts have focused on developing programmable Gaussian boson sampling devices. GBS is a generalization of boson sampling, which traditionally uses single photons as input; GBS instead employs squeezed states of light. In 2020, Xanadu published a blueprint for building a fault-tolerant quantum computer using photonic technology.
In June 2022, Xanadu reported a boson sampling experiment comparable to those of Google and the University of Science and Technology of China. Their setup used loops of optical fiber and multiplexing to replace a network of beam splitters with a single one, which also made the system more reconfigurable. They detected 125 to 219 photons from 216 squeezed modes and claimed a 50 million-fold speedup over previous experiments.
In January 2025, Xanadu advanced photonic quantum computing by demonstrating a scalable modular approach to networking photonic quantum computers. This work, published in Nature, introduced architectural improvements for integrating multiple photonic quantum processors, significantly enhancing error correction and scalability.