We are excited to announce our investment in Agnostiq’s seed round. Based in Toronto, ON, Agnostiq Labs (“Agnostiq”) is developing a suite of applications that seamlessly enable financial institutions (FIs) to leverage QC to power their trading algorithms, all without the need of expensive quantum programming resources. Agnostiq’s applications will allow banks to securely transpile, optimize, and deploy quantum machine learning (QML), quantum Monte Carlo and quantum neural networks in portfolio optimization models. This breakthrough will lead to development of new algorithms at a faster rate and better market predictions.

Financial institutions (FIs) have realized that classical computing is approaching the limit of Moore’s law and there is a gap between the amount of new unstructured data coming in and their ability to process that data to make better decisions. As such, FIs and other organizations are looking to quantum computing (QC) to resolve these issues and deliver the high performance computing they need to maintain their edge. Whether developing the better algorithm to price options or conducting trades in one 64 millionth of a second to capitalize on the arbitrage opportunity, FIs need the compute power to analyze hundreds of millions of data points in real-time to execute their strategies.

While initially focused on banks, we see tremendous opportunity to apply their unique quantum AI workflows and best-in-class security applications across several industries, such as pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and energy. Additionally, we believe Agnostiq can become the platform-of-choice that accelerates enterprise adoption of QC and transforms data scientists into quantum scientists.

We are incredibly impressed with the management team and talent. Collectively, the founders Oktay Goktas, PhD,  and Elliott MacGowan possess the unique combination of deep technical knowledge in QC, sales acumen and operational expertise needed to succeed in this nascent industry. Agnostiq has also proven its ability to attract top tier QC talent with backgrounds in quantum physics, cryptology, mathematics, and computational physics. Given the dearth of available and qualified talent, Agnostiq’s ability to attract, hire, and retain top scientists will solidify its market position and competitive moat.

We believe in Oktay, Elliott, and Edwin’s collective vision on quantum computing and are excited to partner with them in their quest to help enterprises harness the power of AI in quantum computing!

Today companies are driving workforce productivity using 3rd party SaaS applications like Salesforce, Jira, Dropbox which form the backbone of critical functions across the organization. According to a 2020 Devsquad study, companies deploy, on average, 34 different SaaS tools, and that number increases dramatically with company size (reference 1 below).

Company tech stacks are also becoming increasingly decentralized and thus harder to manage. Communication tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams have made it easier than ever to collaborate across teams, but have also led to sensitive information moving unchecked across the enterprise, increasing the risk of data loss and leakage. Last year, over 165 million records were either lost or exposed within the US alone (reference 2 below), all the while increased regulation (e.g., GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act) has levied significant fines and put additional pressure on businesses to revamp their information security and data loss prevention (DLP) strategies.

As organizations continue to grapple with this changing landscape, we are thrilled to announce our investment in Polymer Solutions’ (“Polymer”) seed round. Cyber security is one of our key investment areas, and continues to be important as more work moves to the cloud. We are proud to support Polymer’s vision to become the preeminent platform that manages DLP and redaction across the enterprise technology stack. While most of the DLP market has focused on encryption-based solutions for at-rest data, Polymer is unique in its approach by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) on unstructured, in-motion data to redact Personal Identifiable Information (PII) and sensitive corporate information. This solution will be critical to companies that collect sensitive customer information, such as financial or health data.

Polymer provides an easy-to-use solution that allows enterprise Information Technology departments to create access controls as well as monitor, secure and redact sensitive data across dozens of collaboration apps, including Slack, Github, Dropbox and Zapier. Polymer’s product has already gained significant traction with several large enterprise clients.

Polymer was founded by Yasir Ali and Usman Malik, who are supported by a strong technical team of cyber security, big data and machine learning experts who are excited and well-positioned to tackle this complex data redaction problem. We are thrilled to partner and support Yasir, Usman, and the Polymer team as they continue to expand their data governance platform and grow into a leading security company!

1 ”60 SaaS Statistics and Trends for 2020”, Industry study via Devsquad, 2020
2 “Annual number of data breaches and exposed records in the United States from 2005 to 2019,” Identity Theft Resource Center, 2019