Summary of quantum technology investment events
– Total annual investment for quantum technology startups reached an all-time high ($2.35 billion), although annual growth was only 1%.
-About two-thirds, or 68 percent, of all quantum technology startup investments since 2001 occurred in 2021 and 2022.
– With 350 startups in the quantum technologies ecosystem, the pace of startup creation has slowed and has not kept pace with investments, indicating that investments are going to established startups rather than new ideas. In other words, venture capitalists have also decreased. This information confirms that Series A and B startups have attracted special attention in 2022.
– 2022 was the year of big deals: four of the ten largest quantum technology investment deals since 2001 closed in 2022: SandboxAQ ($500 million), Rigetti ($345 million in a SPAC – Special Purpose Acquisition Company), D-Wave ($300 million in a SPAC deal) and Origin Quantum ($149 million).
– Public investments continue: the United States, the European Union, and Canada committed another $1.8 billion, $1.2 billion, and $0.1 billion, respectively.
Advancement of research and technology
— The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the pioneers of quantum entanglement, Alan Specht, John Kloser, and Anton Zeilinger.
— IBM unveiled the Osprey (433 qubit) and updated its roadmap to develop a 4,000 qubit processor by 2025.
— Xanadu demonstrated the quantum advantage of GBS using its photonic quantum computer. GBS, or Gaussian Boson Sampling, is a probability-distribution-sampling problem whose quantum advantages have already been demonstrated for this problem by Google and researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
– Patent issuance and publication declined in 2022, potentially indicating that the simplest challenges have already been overcome. 1,589 patents related to quantum technology were granted in 2022, down 61% from 2021, and 44,155 papers related to quantum technology were published in 2022, down 5% from 2021.
Potential economic value
-By 2023, the four industries automotive, chemicals, financial services, and life sciences are expected to see the first economic impact from quantum computing, potentially worth $1.3 trillion by 2035.
– The value potential comes from a reassessment of the potential economic value of quantum computing use cases in the financial services industry, which shows an increase of between $394 billion and $700 billion. Corporate banking, risk and cyber security provide the most valuable use cases.
Cultivating quantum talents
-The gap in finding talent for quantum technology jobs has narrowed but remains wide. Almost one in two jobs remained vacant in 2022, compared to one in three in 2021.
– The number of universities offering official master’s degrees in quantum technologies almost doubled from 29 to 50 in 2022.
