ColdQuanta rebrands, adopts name Infleqtion as it shifts focus to commercialization

BOULDER — Boulder-based quantum-technology company ColdQuanta Inc. is at a crossroads — an inflection point, in other words.

The company has spent roughly a decade and a half buried in laboratories, developing technology to build quantum-powered devices and hopefully change the world. ColdQuanta is now emerging from its research and development toil with a suite of products it’s seeking to commercialize. 

Upon reaching this inflection point — which CQ CEO Scott Faris describes as “moving quantum from the lab to the field” — the company has adopted a new trade name to represent itself and the new divisions it has created through recent acquisition activity: Infleqtion.

“We believe that the quantum industry is at a turning point as it needs to move beyond research and focus on bringing practical, quantum-enabled solutions to the world. Substantial technological, financial, and geopolitical drivers are changing the quantum landscape,” Faris said in a prepared statement. “Quantum’s time is now and will require bold leadership to bring together the people, capital, and ideas to drive the largest technological leap in human history.”

The Colorado Secretary of State’s office shows Infleqtion as a new trade name for CQ that was registered this month. 

Infleqtion recently raised $110 million in investment funding to finance a go-to-market play for quantum devices such as sensors, timekeepers and information-transmission antennas with hopes of proving that there’s a market for applications that take advantage of this next-generation science. 

The company has also developed Hibbert, what it claims is the first gate-based cold-atom quantum computer. Widespread commercialization of these ultra-powerful computers is likely still a few years away, which is why Infleqtion is focusing for now on more-mature technologies such as atomic clocks.

Quantum theory attempts to explain the behavior of matter at atomic and subatomic levels.

Quantum computing uses principles of quantum theory to build machinery with capabilities that far exceed traditional computers.

Classical computers use bits that can hold the value of either 1 or 0, which severely limits their processing ability. 

Quantum computers are built with qubits, which harness the quantum property of superposition to hold the value of both 1 and 0 simultaneously. 

The Boulder Valley — with the University of Colorado Boulder physics department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and some prominent quantum-computing companies — has become, over the past three decades or so, the epicenter of the quantum field.

“Quantum has the opportunity to be as transformative for the world or more so than the internet,” Paul Lipman, president of quantum information platforms at Infleqtion (then ColdQuanta,) told BizWest in an interview this year.

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