Horizon Quantum Computing Pte. NASDAQ: HQ used its appearance at Needham & Company’s 21st annual Technology, Media, & Consumer Conference to outline its strategy as a newly public quantum software company focused on building infrastructure for developers, hardware providers and end users.
Needham senior analyst Quinn Bolton opened the fireside chat by noting that Horizon “recently came public in late March.” Dr. Joe Fitzsimons, Horizon’s founder and chief executive officer, said the company’s mission is to build software infrastructure that enables developers to use quantum computers to solve difficult problems and create value for end users.
Fitzsimons said quantum computing hardware has made “tremendous progress” over the past 12 to 18 months, but he added that the industry is not yet at the point where quantum software is running in production and affecting companies’ bottom lines. Horizon’s focus, he said, is on helping the industry get there.
Building a Hardware-Agnostic Software Layer
Fitzsimons described Horizon as sitting “at the heart of the ecosystem” by connecting developers, hardware providers and end users. The company is building programming languages and compilers designed to take code written by developers and compile it for a range of quantum computers. Horizon also aims to package quantum programs as web APIs so they can be incorporated into user-facing software.
He said one of the main challenges in quantum computing is that current programming approaches often require developers to work at a very low level, assembling quantum programs one logic gate at a time. Existing frameworks such as Qiskit and Cirq use Python to help generate quantum circuits, but Fitzsimons said those approaches remain limited because “not all of computation is circuits.”
Horizon’s approach, he said, is to design programming languages for an ideal future quantum computer, then build compilers and runtime capabilities that allow those programs to run on today’s imperfect systems. He said the company’s Triple Alpha software is in early access and primarily used with hardware companies.
Beryllium and the Push Toward Abstraction
A major focus for Horizon is raising the level of abstraction available to quantum programmers. Fitzsimons said the company ultimately wants developers to be able to benefit from quantum computing without needing to understand quantum mechanics.
He said Horizon has developed a sequence of programming languages, including Hydrogen, Helium and Beryllium. Hydrogen is comparable to assembly language, Helium is an imperative language and Beryllium is an object-oriented quantum programming language. Horizon previewed Beryllium in December and has been expanding its capabilities in preparation for external users.
With Beryllium, developers can create classes representing different kinds of information, such as vectors, matrices and graphs. Fitzsimons said those libraries can then be reused by other developers, creating higher levels of abstraction and potentially a broader library ecosystem.
“Each time a developer builds a new library, it kind of builds a new abstraction that is available to all other developers,” Fitzsimons said.
Carbon and Classical Code Acceleration
Bolton also asked about Carbon, a future layer in Horizon’s roadmap intended to accelerate classical code using quantum computing. Fitzsimons said Horizon laid out a path in 2019 that included Hydrogen, Helium, Beryllium and Carbon, and that the company is now on the third of those four steps.
At the Carbon level, Fitzsimons said Horizon aims to automatically construct quantum algorithms from code written for conventional computers. The company’s approach is to identify parts of code that make programs slow, such as loops and recursive function calls, then break them into simpler elements that can potentially be replaced by quantum algorithms.
He said the goal is not to create quantum solutions from scratch, but to start with existing code that already solves a problem and transform it into something more efficient where quantum acceleration is available.
Testbed Systems and Hardware Partnerships
Horizon is also operating its own quantum computing testbed systems. Fitzsimons said the company has a superconducting system based on a Rigetti processor running at its headquarters in Singapore. The system uses a Maybell refrigerator and control systems from Quantum Machines.
He said Horizon has also signed an agreement to purchase a 256-qubit trapped ion system from IonQ, which the company expects to have running sometime in 2027. Fitzsimons said having both superconducting and trapped ion systems gives Horizon experience with two broad categories of quantum computers: solid-state qubits and atomic, molecular and optical systems.
During the quarter, Horizon also added hardware partnerships with Alice & Bob and AQT, according to Fitzsimons. He said working closely with hardware is important because tight integration with control systems helps Horizon extend the capabilities of quantum systems, including support for features such as loops, dynamic memory allocation and mid-computation measurement.
Revenue Strategy and Near-Term Milestones
On go-to-market strategy, Fitzsimons said Horizon’s tools are designed so that programs written in its languages are deployed and executed through the company’s infrastructure. That could position Horizon to charge based on usage and the value of accessed resources, similar to how cloud infrastructure providers charge for web applications.
However, he said Horizon is not currently focused on near-term revenue generation. Instead, the company is prioritizing technology development and hardware integration until “real quantum advantage” begins to emerge. Fitzsimons said pursuing proof-of-concept work or professional services could drive revenue but might turn the company into a consulting business, which is not its focus.
Looking ahead six to 12 months, Fitzsimons said investors should watch for Beryllium becoming available to early access users, expansion of the related library ecosystem and integration of Horizon’s first testbed system with Triple Alpha. He also pointed to the future installation of the second testbed system, which he said should be “right on the cusp” of quantum advantage if it performs to specification.
About Horizon Quantum Computing Pte. NASDAQ: HQ
Horizon Quantum Holdings Ltd. is a quantum software infrastructure company focused on tools and systems that help developers build and deploy quantum applications. The company emphasizes software, algorithms, and workflow infrastructure intended to support practical quantum and hybrid quantum-classical use cases.
Horizon Quantum became a public company through its business combination with dMY Squared Technology Group, Inc (DMYY), which was formed to take a private company public through a business combination.
This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to contact@marketbeat.com.
Before you consider Horizon Quantum Computing Pte., you'll want to hear this.
MarketBeat keeps track of Wall Street's top-rated and best performing research analysts and the stocks they recommend to their clients on a daily basis. MarketBeat has identified the five stocks that top analysts are quietly whispering to their clients to buy now before the broader market catches on... and Horizon Quantum Computing Pte. wasn't on the list.
While Horizon Quantum Computing Pte. currently has a Sell rating among analysts, top-rated analysts believe these five stocks are better buys.
View The Five Stocks Here
Looking for the next FAANG stock before everyone has heard about it? Click the link to see which stocks MarketBeat analysts think might become the next trillion dollar tech company.
Get This Free Report
