UChicago Quantum Spin-Out memQ Closes $10M Series A Funding Round
Sean Sullivan and Manish Singh. Image Courtesy: Argonne National Lab
Cofounded at the University of Chicago, Quantum spin-out memQ has raised $10 million in a Series A round to fuel new stage of growth.
“UChicago was critical in the founding journey. The concentration of talent—including the labs, professors, and especially the quantum undergrad program and the master’s program—has been extremely helpful,” said Cofounder Manish Singh, PhD ’22, who as part of the funding close is transitioning into the role of chief product officer, a move to which he has been looking forward.
“It means doubling down on the deep technical work of bringing the ‘semiconductor goodness’ to quantum and help quantum scale,” Singh said. Charles Foley, a seasoned entrepreneur with a track record in deep tech, has been named CEO, and brings “exactly the operational depth memQ needs at this stage,” he added.
Singh – one of the first students in the country to receive a doctoral degree in quantum engineering from UChicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) – cofounded memQ in 2021 with his PhD advisor Supratik Guha, professor at PME and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and Sean Sullivan, who was at the time a postdoc at Argonne.
The startup quickly received recognition and in 2022 was selected to receive an investment as part of the Polsky Center’s George Shultz Innovation Fund. Later that same year memQ joined the second cohort of Duality, the first accelerator program in the U.S. exclusively focused on supporting innovative quantum startups
Today, memQ is a tenant of the University of Chicago’s Science Incubator at Hyde Park Labs, which Singh said “came up just in time” for the company to stand up its independent experimental capabilities. The company was among the first tenants of the incubator, which opened last year and provides move-in-ready lab space with optical suites, cryostat capacity, and direct access to the 124-mile fiber optic quantum loop, as well as innovation programming provided by the Polsky Center.
As for next steps, Singh said they are focused on “building a great team and delivering value to our customers.” This means focusing on the xQNA (extensible quantum network architecture) product portfolio, a charge which he will lead in his new role.
“Part of our path to success is the ability to distribute resources to the greatest points of need so that we keep moving forward. Manish is one of the top minds in the industry at blending the power of quantum with the scale of commercial semiconductor technology, and he asked the board if we could allow him to spend more of his cycles there in order to truly increase shareholder value. And that’s the mark of a truly great founder,” said Foley.
“After serving as executive chairman of the company’s Board of Directors for the past 15 months, I can share that the enthusiasm and confidence that our board and investors have in the company continues to grow,” added Foley. “We’re solving really important challenges in what is arguably the next great horizon of information technology.”