The startup expects to 'roughly double' the number of qubits available in its cloud every six months and will let businesses, developers, and researchers build novel solutions to problems in finance, quantum chemistry, machine learning, and graph analytics.

Quantum computing leverages qubits (unlike bits that can only be in a state of 0 or 1, qubits can also be in a superposition of the two) to perform computations that would be much more difficult for a classical computer.

Xanadu has been developing quantum computers based on photonics since its founding in September 2016. Its  quantum processors operate at room temperature and can be integrated into existing fibre optic-based telecommunication infrastructure.

Beatle’s themed Xanadu is best known for the development of PennyLane, an open source software library for quantum machine learning, quantum computing, and quantum chemistry. The company also develops Strawberry Fields, its cross-platform Python library for simulating and executing programs on quantum photonic hardware.

Both open source tools are available on GitHub, and they have a growing community fostering tutorials and educational materials for anyone interested in developing and experimenting with quantum applications.