Exclusive: Chad Rigetti’s Sygaldry raises $139 million to bring quantum hardware to AI data centers |
Exclusive: Chad Rigetti’s Sygaldry raises $139 million to bring quantum hardware to AI data centers
Chad Rigetti has devoted his career to quantum computing—a phrase you’ve perhaps most recently encountered in Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Superhero movies aside, quantum computing is somewhere between reality and moonshot. In the most rudimentary terms (all I feel remotely qualified to give you), a quantum computer uses counterintuitive rules of physics to compute some information exponentially faster than “classical” computers. It’s real—though it’s so far failed to scale or find widespread commercial use—and it holds an air of science fiction, even in how an expert like Rigetti thinks about it.
Take his new company’s name. It’s drawn from Patrick Rothfuss’s sci-fi novel The Name of the Wind.
“In the book, ‘sygaldry’ is a discipline that involves inscribing runes or letters on different objects to govern heat or light flow,” Rigetti told Fortune. “It’s also an engineering discipline with some degree of precision to it. If you do it wrong, you can blow things up.”
Sygaldry is the company Rigetti cofounded in 2024 after leaving Rigetti Computing, the developer of quantum computer circuits that he founded in 2013 and went public via SPAC in 2022. Sygaldry’s been quiet for years, but recently spoke to Fortune, exclusively revealing for the first time that it raised funding. Sygaldry has raised a total of $139 million, including a $105 million Series A led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures that closed in March. The company’s $34 million seed round was led by Initialized Capital and closed back in August.
At Sygaldry, Rigetti and cofounders Idalia Friedson and Michael Keiser are looking at one of AI’s central questions: How are we going to power all these data centers? Rigetti believes that quantum can offer answers, as Sygaldry designs servers for AI data centers that include both quantum hardware and classical chips.
The idea is this: work with multiple quantum hardware types that help run AI workloads faster than Nvidia’s GPUs can. Rigetti’s goal: “To have machines in commercial production that are providing speed up for these AI workloads around the end of the decade.”
“Quantum is going to be a fundamentally more........