2024 MIT R&D Conference: Startup Exchange Lightning Talks - qBraid

KANAV SETIA: Hi, everyone. My name is Kanav Setia. And I'm a co-founder and CEO of qBraid, a one-stop platform for accessing the entire quantum ecosystem. Before I tell you about qBraid, how many people here know about quantum computing? Nice. And how many people here use quantum computers to solve actual problems? [LAUGHS] And that's why I'm here. So essentially, quantum computers are these new kinds of computers that harness the power of quantum mechanics to do certain tasks exponentially faster than normal classical digital computers.

In 2019, Google did an experiment where a certain mathematical problem that would have taken the best supercomputer in the world 10,000 years to solve, they solved it on their quantum computer in under 3 minutes. Since then, there have been like a lot of improvements in classical algorithms. That factor has gone down, but essentially, that sort of exponential improvement still exists. And it increases, the factor increases with the size of the problem.

Another important problem why you all have heard of quantum computing is a factoring algorithm which underpins all of the encryption we know today. So essentially, given a large enough quantum computer, you could break encryption in under a day that would take normal classical computers millions, if not billions, of years. Let's say you get sold on quantum computers, and you want to try out.

So this is what the experience looks like. You have to deal with a lot of messy classical computing tasks, where you have to set up the environment, manage all the access to cloud-hosted quantum computers, deal with different architectures of quantum computers and their compilers and simulators. It's a messy thing that while you have to learn about quantum computers, you have to deal with these problems as well. And we simplify that. We are a cloud-hosted, one-stop platform that provides you the easiest access.

The way I like to pitch it is we take you from not knowing much about quantum computer to writing your first quantum program, to running it on a real quantum computer all in under 5 minutes. And I've done this multiple times. And this is the entire reason why so many different companies are starting to partner with us. We partner very closely with IBM, NVIDIA, AWS, QuEra, IonQ, Xanadu. You name the quantum company, we have something going on with them. We have their software available and many times their hardware available as well.

We constantly are expanding our partnerships with many more companies, so in order to serve our end user customers better. And we also support GPUs and CPUs. So all your compute needs in one place. You can just buy qBraid credits and decide to spend them on GPUs or QPUs. Ultimately, we believe the architecture for compute will be a hybrid, where you would solve part of your problem on a quantum computer, part on GPUs and CPUs. And we are in best place to serve that model.

And let's say, you know a place, where to get started. What sort of applications would you be looking at. There's a whole bunch of applications that people are starting to explore with applications pharmaceutical, material science, aerospace, and so on. With pharmaceutical, material science, the exponential improvement is expected with higher confidence, whereas the other industries, people are still exploring how to use quantum computers.

One of the areas that we ourselves focus at qBraid is protein-drug interaction. How do you go from protein and drug molecule to solving this problem on a quantum computer? And this is where we have the protein coming from, Alzheimer's drug, something called beta amyloid, and understanding its interaction with metal ions that leads to these diseases and plaques in the brain, which are hallmarks of these diseases.

And so this is a project with MIT, UChicago, NVIDIA, Argonne National Lab. And we built this really cool pipeline that takes advantage of state-of-the-art algorithms being developed at these institutions. We bring them together and allow you to run on a quantum computer. This is an act of development. And we have things being tested on HPC and quantum computers.

How do we work with various stakeholders? With enterprise world, of course, you're more than welcome to use all of the resources available on our platform. But we also help you understand how we can enable the best algorithms for your use cases. We are one of the largest-- we have one of the largest user bases in the community, and that's driven by the fact that we are super easy to use.

We're incredibly popular with end users, one of the largest user bases, incredibly popular at hackathon. We support MIT's hackathon every year. And with quantum computing companies, we allow them to launch their software and hardware on qBraid. Quick ask. We're looking for beta tester companies for using our quanta bind pipeline for protein and drug simulation. We're also happy to collaborate with you to provide access to qBraid platform. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: Thank you so much, Kanav.