Honeywell completes business combination, now majority owner of Quantinuum, a quantum computing company

CHARLOTTE – Honeywell successfully completed a business combination of its Honeywell Quantum Solutions division with Cambridge Quantum, and has formed a new company, Quantinuum.

The previously announced business combination results in Honeywell owning a majority stake in Quantinuum. Honeywell and IBM were both prior investors with Cambridge Quantum.

Honeywell also announced that the company has entered a long-term agreement with the newly formed Quantinuum for Honeywell to assist in the manufacturing of the critical ion traps required to power trapped-ion quantum hardware.

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“The formation of Quantinuum marks an important milestone for the quantum computing industry,” said Darius Adamczyk, chairman and chief executive officer of Honeywell, and chairman of Quantinuum, in a statement.

“Quantinuum is now the largest and most advanced integrated quantum computing company in the world,” said Ilyas Khan, CEO of the new company and the founder of Cambridge Quantum, in a statement published by the newly formed company on its website. “By uniting the best-in-class quantum software available with the highest performing hardware available, we are uniquely positioned to bring real, quantum computing products and solutions to large, high-growth markets in the near term, the medium term and the longer term as quantum computers scale in capacity and quality.

Quantinuum will be jointly headquartered in Cambridge, U.K., and in Broomfield, Co., according to the company’s website and statement. It plans to launch what it billed as a “quantum cyber security product” this month, and an “enterprise software package that applies quantum computing to solve complex scientific problems in pharmaceuticals, materials science, specialty chemicals and agrochemicals” in 2022, according to its statement on its website.

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The company employs about 400 people, and also has offices in Japan and Germany, and is an IBM Quantum Hub. The company recently announced what it called “groundbreaking advances in the financial industry” by enabling quantum Monte Carlo simulations, and also conducted an experiment in quantum natural language processing, among other projects.

Quantinuum’s System Model H1 quantum computer, which the company noted is powered by Honeywell, recently achieved a quantum volume of 1,024, which according to Honeywell is the highest measured on a commercial quantum computer to date. In June, the company achieved a quantum volume of 512.

According to the company, Quantinuum has a staff of nearly 400, over 300 of whom are engineers and scientists that include some of the world’s leading quantum computing experts. It has offices in the U.S., United Kingdom, Japan and Germany, and is an IBM Quantum Hub.

Honeywell chose Charlotte as its global headquarters in 2018.