QuEra Computing Inc.
Quantum Computing company in Boston, Massachusetts
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
QuEra Computing Inc. is a quantum computing company based in Boston, Massachusetts. The company develops quantum computers using neutral atoms based on research conducted at both Harvard University and MIT. QuEra also develops software for simulating systems of Rydberg atoms.[1][2] and finding solutions to Combinatorial Optimization problems.[3]
- Mikhail Lukin
- Vladan Vuletić
- Markus Greiner
- Dirk Englund
- Nathan Gemelke
- John Pena
| Company type | Private company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Quantum Computing |
| Founded | 2018 |
| Founders |
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| Headquarters | , United States |
Key people |
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| Products |
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| Website | www |
QuEra actively conducts research in Condensed Matter Physics[4] and combinatorial optimization[5] using neutral atoms as well.
History
QuEra Computing was founded by Mikhail Lukin, Vladan Vuletić, Markus Greiner, Dirk Englund, Nathan Gemelke, and John Pena in 2018.[2] It emerged from stealth on November 17, 2021.[6]
Prior to QuEra's founding, research into using and controlling neutral atoms had already started in 2015 at Harvard and MIT, culminating in a 51-qubit machine[7] which later led to the development of a 256-qubit machine.[8]
On October 24, 2024, the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center announced a $16 million expansion to its computing campus, planning to build a quantum computing complex. QuEra Computing was announced as a partner in the project.[9]
In September 2025 QuEra secures 230 million series B investment from NVentures and Google to accelerate fault tolerant neutral atom quantum computing.[10]
On February 4, 2026, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) called for proposals as part of its Quantum Computing Access at NERSC (QCAN) program to conduct research on QuEra’s “Aquila” and “Gemini.” Up to six projects will be selected for the three-month Stage A, to commence in April 2026 to demonstrate the potential to run on real hardware. “Aquila” teams will be allocated up to 12.5 hours of QPU usage each while “Gemini” teams will focus on simulation and workflow development instead of hardware usage. “Aquila” teams that advance to Stage B will be allocated up to 25 hours of additional QPU time each to complete their research, while “Gemini” teams will be allocated up to 10 hours of QPU time each. If any teams do not advance, their QPU time will be redistributed to advancing teams. Projects will be completed by December 31, 2026.[11]
Technology
QuEra uses neutral atoms based on Rubidium which are controlled and trapped using lasers[12] as its qubits. The company commercializes a neutral atom array developed in Mikhail Lukin’s lab through a licensing agreement with Harvard’s Office of Technology Development for the Lukin group’s patent portfolio. Ultra-cold, suspended rubidium atoms move about and can be entangled mid-computation to perform gates. Logical operations involve the parallel, multiplexed, laser control of the entire groups of atoms that constitute logical qubits.[13]
On November 1, 2022, QuEra released its 256-qubit machine Aquila, to the general public through the Amazon cloud service Braket.[14][15]
On January 9, 2024, QuEra published a three-year roadmap. It showed >256 atoms with 10 logical qubits and transversal gates in 2024, >3,000 atoms with 30 logical qubits and magic state distillation in 2025, and >10,000 atoms with 100 logical qubits in 2026. The logical qubits were defined as having lower error rates than their constituent physical qubits. A cloud-based logical qubit simulator was due in the first half of 2024.[16]
QuEra currently supports an analog computing mode that relies on the Rydberg blockade phenomena and the position of atoms to achieve superposition and entanglement. The analog mode could allow problems such as the Maximum Weight Independent set (graph theory) (MWIS) to be expressed and solved with research from the company to map other problems onto MWIS as well[17][18]
QuEra planned to offer a hybrid analog-digital quantum computer followed by a fully digital gate-based system.[2] The analog “Aquila” is typically capable of three shots per second, while the digital “Gemini” is typically capable of one shot per second.[19]
QuEra was selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to participate in Stage B of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), joining ten other leading companies in the quantum computing industry.[20] This selection follows QuEra's successful completion of Stage A, which required participants to outline a path to developing utility-scale quantum computers. The QBI program seeks to assess whether a practical, industrially useful quantum computer can be realized by 2033.
Products and systems
“Aquila” is a programmable quantum simulator that uses highly focused lasers to trap and precisely arrange individual ultracold rubidium atoms into two-dimensional arrays of up to 256 qubits. A spatial light modulator shapes an optical two-dimensional wavefront, which transforms light into optical tweezers. A first set of optical tweezers loads atoms into a random arrangement, then a second set moves them into a defect-free antiferromagnetic arrangement in which each atom has the opposite magnetic moment of its neighbors, and then coherent optical beams are used to excite the atoms into Rydberg states. Atomic interactions are used to perform Analog Hamiltonian Simulation (AHS).[21]
On April 21, 2024, QuEra launched Bloqade, an open-source Julia language quantum simulation package.[22]
“Gemini” is a 260-atom gate-model quantum computer using 87Rubidium with a dynamic qubit array (DQA™) that allows parallel operations and all-to-all connectivity with room temperature operation. There is a storage zone and an entanglement zone for gate operations. Single-qubit gate fidelity is >99.9% fidelity, two-qubit gate fidelity is >99.2%, and SPAM fidelity is 99.7%. The shot rate is one per second. “Gemini” has been used to demonstrate magic state distillation and is designed for hybrid computing with high-performance computing (HPC) and analog systems.[23]
Research
On December 8, 2023, a Harvard team led by QuEra co-founder Mikhail Lukin published in Nature the demonstration of 48 logical qubits capable of executing hundreds of logical gate operations. The team included QuEra co-founder Markus Greiner and QuEra. The research was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices program, the National Science Foundation Physics Frontiers Center’s Center for Ultracold Atoms, the Army Research Office, the joint Quantum Institute/NIST, and QuEra. [24]
On August 5, 2025, QuEra published in the National Library of Medicine “Robust Quantum Reservoir Learning for Molecular Property Prediction” with authors from Deloitte Consulting LLP, Amgen, Technical University of Darmstadt, and Merck Healthcare KGaA. Quantum reservoir computing (QRC) was applied to use molecular descriptors to predict the biological activity of potential drug molecules, finding advantages as dataset sizes decrease and better separability between active and inactive compounds in low-dimensional learned feature spaces.[25]
On September 11, 2025, following the NVentures investment in QuEra, the company’s collaborations with Nvidia were revealed to be: “Gemini” is integrated with Nvidia’s CUDA-Q software alongside ABCI-Q’s 2,000+ H100 GPUs; QuEra is a founding collaborator at Nvidia's Accelerated Quantum Center in Boston, coupling its hardware with GB200 NVL72 GPU clusters for large-scale simulation and decoder research; and the co-development of Nvidia-trained transformer models for quantum error correction (QEC). [26]
On September 15, 2025, researchers from Harvard and MIT, including QuEra co-founders Mikhail Lukin, Markus Greiner, and Vladan Vuletić published in Nature the demonstration of a coherent 3,000-qubit system with coherent storage and quantum information manipulation. A series of two optical lattice conveyor belts transport atom reservoirs into the science region, where atoms in spin-polarized or coherent superposition states are extracted into optical tweezers at a reloading rate of 300,000 atoms per second. The 30,000+ initialized qubits per second are used to assemble and maintain a 3,000+ atomic array for more than 2 hours. Nearby stored qubits are unaffected.[27]
Deployments and partnerships
On October 23, 2023, QuEra was awarded two Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Imagining Practical Applications for a Quantum Tomorrow (IMPAQT) contracts for quantum algorithms. The first, “Quantum Reservoir Learning using Neutral Atoms and its Applications,” extended a previous quantum machine learning proof-of-concept involving the MNIST handwritten digit dataset. The second, “Error-Corrected Quantum Architectures Based on Transversal Logical Gates,” involved surface codes with the use of transversal logical entangling gates. Five of QuEra’s partners also received DARPA IMPAQT grants for their projects involving QuEra’s “Aquila.”[28]
On February 5, 2024, QuEra announced that the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) at Harwell, Oxfordshire, with support from the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) framework, would host a qubit shuttling and error correction testbed to be built by QuEra and UK-based collaborators in early 2025.[29]
On April 30, 2024, QuEra was awarded a JPY 6.5B (USD $42M) contract to deliver a computer to Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), where it would be installed in 2025 on-premises alongside the ABCI-Q supercomputer to develop a hybrid quantum-classical computing platform.[30] Installation was announced on May 29, 2025. [31]
QuEra’s partner program is called the QuEra Quantum Alliance. On September 30, 2025, Boston Consulting Group’s BCG X AI Science Institute joined the QuEra Quantum Alliance to enable application codesign on priority use cases to develop and validate prototypes.[32]
On November 17, 2025, QuEra announced a collaboration with Dell Technologies to demonstrate a prototype of the integration of quantum computers into datacenters, hybrid classical-quantum computing (HQCC), secure data governance, and low latency at Supercomputing 2025 (SC25). The prototype demonstration would be a Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) state.[33]
On February 2, 2026, QuEra and Roadrunner Venture Studios announced a $4M strategic partnership to build a quantum testbed with full-time, on-premises QuEra staff at the Roadrunner Quantum Lab (RQL) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It will be QuEra’s second location in the United States.[34]
Funding
QuEra emerged from stealth on November 17, 2021, with $17M in funding from Rakuten, Day One Ventures, Frontiers Capital, Serguei Beloussov, and Paul Maritz.[35]
On February 11, 2025, QuEra raised $230M in a Series B round with a post-money valuation of $1B. The lead investors were SoftBank Vision Fund and Google Quantum AI. Valor Equity Partners, QVT Family Office, and Safar Partners were the other investors.[36] On September 9, 2025, Nvidia’s NVentures venture capital arm extended the Series B round.[37]
Leadership
QuEra was cofounded by Mikhail Lukin, Vladan Vuletić, Markus Greiner, Dirk Englund, Nathan Gemelke, and John Pena. [38]
On July 15, 2024,[39] QuEra announced that Alex Keesling would transition from CEO to an unnamed new role and that the Board of Directors had appointed board member Andy Ory to serve as the acting CEO while the board searched for a replacement.[40]
The leadership team includes Andy Ory (chief executive officer), Takuya Kitagawa (president), Alex Keesling (chief science officer), Nathan Gemelke (chief technology strategist), Mikhail Lukin (chief scientist), Vladan Vuletić (chief technology officer), Yuval Boger (chief commercial officer), and Ed Durkin (chief financial officer).[41]