Cambridge tech firm Riverlane has been awarded a £2.1m grant from Horizon Europe to develop its quantum error correction decoder.
The quantum startup has become one of the best-funded in its field in the UK, closing a £15m Series B round last year.
The European Innovation Council (EIC) Transition grant, funded by the Horizon Europe Guarantee and backed by the UK’s tech department, will support the development of Riverlane’s foundational quantum error correction research.
The project, if successful, will be able to decode quantum operations in real-time, which the company described as a crucial step towards achieving ‘quantum advantage’ – the point at which quantum computers can solve problems beyond the limits of traditional computers.
“The field of quantum error correction has gone from theory to practice with several landmark experiments in recent years demonstrating effective quantum error correction offline in software,” said Riverlane founder and CEO Steve Brierley.
“But for quantum computers to scale to the millions and ultimately trillions of reliable operations to solve problems beyond the capability of supercomputers, we need decoders that can detect and correct errors in real-time, meaning millions of times per second.”
Horizon Europe is a programme from the European Union to fund the development of science and technology. The UK briefly left the scheme following the EU referendum, however, it rejoined in September 2023.