Quantum Computing Startup - BosonQ Psi Raised $525k in Pre-Seed Round

BosonQ Psi (BQP), a Quantum-based enterprise SaaS software venture, has raised $525,000 in pre-seed funding led by 3to1 Capital. Key industry leaders participated in this round, both from India and US. Notable Indian-based angel investors include Abhay Tandon, Vijay Sethi, Chandan Chowdhury, Saptorshi Hore, Neeraj Khandelwal, Ankur Jain and Vijay Rajagopal. Notable US-based angel investors include Shankar Rachakonda and Anand Reddy.

Abhishek Chopra, Co-Founder & CEO of BosonQ Psi, said, "Large-scale engineering simulations are vital in developing engineering-heavy products, from cars to aircraft or from drug discovery to additive manufacturing. Quantum computing, with its unimaginable power, will unlock the new realm of such simulations which previously couldn't be performed accurately or were cost and time prohibitive. With BQPhy, engineering and R&D teams can now avoid costly recall issues and speed their products' innovation cycle, respectively. For businesses this means reducing both CAPEX and OPEX respectively."

The startup is developing the world's first Quantum-powered engineering simulation software - BQPhy^TM. With its product, enterprise customers from the automotive, aerospace, and manufacturing sector can accelerate their time-to-market significantly while increasing the quality of their products.

Abhay Tandon, Co-Founder and GP at 3to1 Capital, mentioned, "We believe in investing in smart founders who are audacious enough to build the future! The BQP founders and team are building the future through quantum tech, which has a multifold impact on society.  Through their innovative simulation engineering modules powered by quantum tech, they would solve problems for large enterprises such as faster GTM and robust products and for the consumers around safety and confidence. It's a huge market with a multi-billion-dollar TAM and the founders have the gumption to make it happen! We firmly believe in their vision and are glad to be a part of their journey."

The MVP of BQPhy was launched earlier this year at the Quantum Business Europe conference and gained significant traction post their launch. BQP is currently carrying out pilots with global automotive, aerospace, and manufacturing companies. With the funding, the team is now gearing for the product launch next year, with the alpha and beta versions being launched later this year.

"We're getting a lot of inbound traction from top enterprise customers because they can readily see the competitive edge they could get with our solution and save millions of dollars. The funding will aid in hiring more people who are highly specialized to deliver such innovative products both from the tech and commerce side of things," added Rut Lineswala, Co-Founder & CTO of BosonQ Psi.

The round saw distinguished personality from simulation industry, viz., Dr. Chandan Chowdhury who is currently the Senior Associate Dean and Practice Professor (Operations Management and Information Systems) at the Indian School of Business and previously the Managing Director of Dassault Systems (India-Geo).  He stated, “Many real-life problems like the modelling of the brain, simulation of propagation of cancer in the human system, drug discovery for combating “drug-resistant bacteria,”  understanding the impact of our decisions on carbon footprint and global warming, forecasting weather, and natural calamities, reducing the cycle time of designing complex systems like electric vehicles, aircraft and simulating their performance before physical manufacturing, can be better solved by using quantum-inspired algorithms running on quantum computers. Classical computers (working on bits-zeros and ones) impose massive constraints on complex modelling phenomena, and the run time of accurate algorithms is very long. I am hopeful that BQP will help solve some of these puzzles”. Dr. Chowdhury is also part of BQP’s advisory board which is chaired by industry veteran Mr. Vijay Sethi (Ex-CIO of Hero Motor Corp.). The board also includes experienced industry leaders like Mr. Ashish Khare and Mr. Arvind Rajgopalan.

In less than two years since its inception, BosonQ Psi has already gained international recognition. The startup finished as one of the top finalists of the BMW Quantum Challenge last year and is invited to present the solution to the other significant Automotive industry later this month in Munich.

It has also graduated from a well-renowned QUEST program hosted by Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre at the University of Bristol (UK). In its home turf of the India Quantum ecosystem, BQP recently won the "Most Innovative Startup" award by TIE Bangalore at its Matrix Forum.

BQP was founded in September of 2020 by three young entrepreneurs. Two tech founders, Abhishek Chopra (CEO) and Rut Lineswala (CTO) have a strong background in engineering simulations and high-performance computing. Both graduated from Rutgers University (USA) and later moved on to their graduate school, Abhishek to Rensselaer Polytechnique Institute (USA) and Rut to the University of Minnesota, where they performed large-scale scientific computations on powerful supercomputers. The third co-founder, Jash Minocha (CFO), comes from a strong finance and financial technology background (quantitative finance & blockchain). He did his undergraduate from Christ University (India) and Masters from the University College of London (UK).