2022-Korea-Showcase-Zapata-Computing

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: [KOREAN SPEECH]

SHOJI NISHIURA: Hello. This is my honor to be here to speak today in front of you. And my name is Shoji Nishiura from Zapata Computing. And Zapata is a member MIT Engine member company.

And Zapata Computing builds the software for enterprise customers to solve the world's most complex computational problems with quantum and quantum-inspired methods. Zapata spun out of Harvard in 2017 from one of the top labs in creating algorithms and software for quantum computing that uses quantum physics instead of classical physics, which is currently used for computers.

Why do we need quantum computing? Simply put, this graph shows the reason. In theory, quantum computers are exponentially fast in certain types of computation. For example, things that would take 330 years take only 10 minutes, and 3,330 years takes 11 minutes and onward.

In the long term, we will be able to solve problems that are absolutely impossible with the current most powerful supercomputers in the world. An example would be optimization of supply chain and logistics. Also, the example would be like development and creation of absolutely new types of materials and the simulation of enormously complex financial scenarios, and so on.

So here you may ask, OK, I understand this theory. But what is it now? And what does it mean for me? That question is exactly what Zapata is addressing.

So you can start doing it now. And you can enhance the existing computation to make them more accurate and faster. So an example would be optimization of supply chain, and productive maintenance, flow detection, and so on.

Zapata brings proprietary methods, which can extract more performance from quantum hardware, which is very limited today in its size and performance. With our techniques and platform, it requires smaller quantum hardware to perform the same tasks. It means that the first quantum-accelerated application is possible earlier when using our techniques, allowing us to deliver first-mover benefit for our clients.

Now how do we do it? The foundation is IP and research. That becomes Zapata's algorithms, and application, and library.

On top of the IP and research, we built a platform, which we call Orquestra. And Orquestra is a workflow-based quantum-ready platform. It is integrated with major classical and quantum hardware.

And also, it's software, hardware, and cloud agnostic. Then applications are engineered for enterprise deployment. As you can imagine, we are doing a lot of machine learning and optimization applications with our customers.

And Orquestra also supports the entire life cycle of software development. So starting from research of use cases, so some applications are good much with quantum computation and some are not. So this is very important to identify the use case which matches with the quantum computing.

And by selecting such a use case, you can develop the prototype and test if actually, it works or not. And once you create such a prototype, you can measure the performance of the quantum applications together against your existing software or maybe classical algorithms working on a supercomputer, or GPU cluster, or whatever it is. And once you've confirmed that the quantum application or quantum-ready application is better performing, Orquestra supports deploying it into your production environment. So it supports the entire software lifecycle. And also, the quantum application can be used in various verticals, including biopharma, energy, finance, logistics, materials, and more.

Our customer base includes blue-chip companies, including BP, BBVA, BASF, and DARPA from the United States Department of Defense, and some beverage companies-- basically, it's in Japan-- and Andretti Autosport, which is a little bit unique customer base. But auto race involves a lot of data and analyzation of such data generated from races. And as you can see, this is showing the economic benefit.

This is estimated by McKinsey. But the other consulting firms, such as Boston Consulting, Accenture are showing the similar estimation. And estimated economy value is significant in each of those verticals.

We have teammates across the globe. Someone is working remotely from Africa, and South America, and so on. And we established the entity in Boston as headquarters, and Toronto, London, and Tokyo. And in Korea, what we are hoping is that you have great enterprises, especially in segments like semiconductors, electronics, and materials, as well as automotive and service segment.

So we are hoping to work with those enterprise companies. And also, we are not familiar with the ecosystem in Korea currently. So I'm assuming that we need hand-holding. So anyone who can hold our hands to bring to our target customer or enterprise-- that would be great.

So finally, Zapata's mission is to deliver the first-mover advantage to enterprise customers. So the quantum revolution is not a matter of if it happens or not, but when it will happen. So anyway, it is happening. So the ones who start earlier will get the benefit. So we can make our clients win the quantum revolution rather than be disrupted by it.

Thank you. And you can see my contacts here. And I'll be around in the next room, so please contact me. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]