- January 14, 2026
- 5:50 pm
- World News
The American-Ukrainian startup Haiqu, operating in the field of quantum software, announced the raising of 11 million dollars in seed-stage investments. The company is developing a software stack that allows practical quantum algorithms to be run today — with significantly lower computational costs than existing solutions.
The funding round was led by the American venture fund Primary Venture Partners. Haiqu emphasizes that the investor supported the company’s strategy to reduce the cost of quantum computing and decrease the load on hardware resources, which remain the main barrier to large-scale experiments.
The round also included participation from Qudit Investments led by former AT&T CEO John Donovan, Alumni Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Silicon Roundabout Ventures, Angel One Fund, as well as early investors Toyota Ventures and Mac Venture Capital. This lineup of participants reflects the growing interest of the venture market in infrastructure solutions in the quantum industry — not only in equipment but also in software layers that make it practically applicable.
According to the startup’s press release, the raised funds will be directed towards accelerating the implementation of Haiqu’s operating system for quantum applications. This refers to a hardware-oriented software stack that allows the execution of near-future applied tasks, reducing computational costs by hundreds of times compared to traditional approaches.
According to Haiqu CEO and co-founder Richard Givan, the development of quantum computing today is constrained by two factors: the high cost of cloud quantum services and the limited performance of available equipment. The company’s goal is to change this situation as quickly as possible through software solutions that allow larger algorithms to be run at a reasonable price.
The Haiqu startup was founded in 2022 by Richard Givan, a Stanford University graduate, and Nikolai Maksimenko — a quantum physicist with experience working at the Max Planck Institutes in Germany and the Weizmann Institute in Israel. It is this combination of academic expertise and engineering approach that forms the basis of the company’s technological strategy.
Haiqu’s headquarters is located in New York, while the team is distributed across Ukraine, the USA, Canada, the UK, EU countries, and Singapore. This format allows the startup to simultaneously work with scientific centers, corporate partners, and applied solution markets.
Haiqu’s technologies are aimed at overcoming the key limitations of modern quantum equipment. The company optimizes the execution of quantum applications, reduces the impact of errors, uses highly efficient subroutines, and orchestrates the software stack in such a way as to accelerate computations and save resources. In particular, the startup was the first in the world to demonstrate the ability to load realistic high-dimensional data into quantum algorithms.
As noted by Nikolai Maksimenko, Haiqu’s approach allows researchers and engineers to conduct quality experiments, quickly improve them iteratively, and stay within a reasonable budget. According to him, the new funding round will accelerate the company’s transition from impressive technological demonstrations to a scalable product.
Primary Venture Partners partner Brian Schechter emphasizes that quantum equipment must become more resilient to noise and operate on a larger scale. According to him, Haiqu minimizes hardware shortcomings to maximize the potential of quantum computing now and for many years until fully stable qubits appear.
Toyota Ventures also notes the rapid progress of the industry: in recent years, the industry has moved from modeling simple tasks to demonstrating quantum advantage in specialized scientific fields. According to investors, it will soon become evident that useful quantum algorithms will rely precisely on such infrastructure systems as those consistently created by Haiqu.
Previously, the startup had already demonstrated the ability of quantum computers to work with high-dimensional data characteristic of real tasks and use this to improve anomaly detection algorithms — a direction in demand both in science and industry.
For the Israeli and Ukrainian audience, this story is important not only as an investment news but also as an example of how academic experience gained in leading scientific centers is transformed into applied technological products of a global level. It is at such intersections of science, startup culture, and international cooperation that the agenda is being formed today, which is regularly covered by НАновости — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency.
