Interview | Yudong Cao, CTO and Katherine Londergan, CMO

Katherine Londergan, Chief Marketing Officer at Zapata and Yudong Cao Ph.D., CTO and Founder at Zapata share their thoughts on how the pandemic has helped drive a digital transformation across many verticals and the impact of this on Quantum Technologies. Katherine Londergan and Yudong Cao also discuss the major challenges Zapata have faced in the Quantum landscape and which industries are taking to Quantum technology the most.

Can you explain what your company do within the quantum landscape?

Zapata Computing builds quantum-ready applications™ for enterprise deployment. Our quantum application development—and our customers’ - is done on our platform, Orquestra®. We use best-in-class quantum and classical methods to solve optimization, machine learning and simulation problems for global Fortune 1000 customers across industries.

What has been your biggest challenge in the industry?

It’s hard to pick just one challenge. There are two challenges that motivate most of our work at Zapata, all in our mission to deliver first-mover advantage to enterprise customers. The first is that our scientists are constantly challenged to create algorithms, applications and novel methods that push the boundaries of what’s possible on current hardware (quantum and classical). The second challenge, which our engineers are tackling head-on, is the challenge of enterprise deployment. In other words, accounting for the complexity of enterprise architecture in our platform, Orquestra, as well as the custom applications we build for customers. We’re excited to discuss this in detail at Q.Tech this year, in service of making quantum computing more real and feasible for the enterprise.

We have seen the pandemic drive a digital transformation across many verticals; how is this impacting on quantum technologies?

Our enterprise customers are including quantum as part of their digital transformation strategy. Quantum computing builds on their AI capabilities to leverage additional types of compute and more sophisticated approaches to analytics. We and our customers are using Orquestra (Zapata’s software platform) to solve more problems in transportation and logistics as the world becomes even more remote, and seeing a greater need for new approaches to IT infrastructure optimization as well as IT systems are stressed more than ever. All of this also creates more pressure on talent and capability building—and as we are seeing, quantum skillsets are even more rare than data science. We’re keeping this in mind as we develop new features and interactions for our Orquestra users: those who are more “native” to quantum backgrounds and those who are upskilling from other coding, programming, data science backgrounds.

Can you give any good real-world examples of the implementation of your technologies?

In our work with a global top 5 food and beverage company, we saved the company time and money in daily beverage delivery operations.

Problem: Optimize operations that support delivery to hundreds of thousands of locations, ultimately to increase revenue and decrease fuel costs and carbon footprint. Improve architecture to support faster, more efficient daily routing computation.

Solution: Optimized computational process for delivery operations across vending machine locations. This results with operations starting 45 minutes earlier each day, saving time and cost in operations. Using real data and compute introduces huge amounts of complexity and overhead for the solution. We will be covering this at Q.Tech Virtual. It’s important to note that these approaches are classical to date and forward-compatible with quantum solutions we can implement in the future.

In our work with BBVA, we demonstrated potential speedup for credit valuation adjustments.

Problem: Since the 2008 Financial Crisis, banks must assess credit risk and stress-test financial scenarios, often with computationally intensive, extremely costly Monte Carlo simulations. Any performance improvements directly impact daily operations costs, financial product pricing, and risk analysis.

Solution: Designed novel quantum circuits that provide speedup in Monte Carlo simulations, which BBVA uses for credit valuation adjustment (CVA) and derivative pricing. This work significantly reduces resources needed to gain a practical quantum advantage in derivative pricing calculations. In our work with BP, we’ve continued to help them chart a path to viable use of Quantum Computing for Chemistry

Problem: Determine how much impact quantum computing will have on chemistry calculations core to bp’s business—and when.

Solution: Used Zapata proprietary techniques to make an essential variational algorithm (VQE) more viable for a critical molecular simulation use case. Benchmarked solution across current quantum hardware. Read the full article here. 

Do you think quantum computing will augment or replace classical computing?

Augment! Quantum computing solutions in practice will always be a hybrid of classical and quantum. This has less to do with the maturity of existing quantum devices than it does with the relative strengths of classical and quantum computing. What this means for bringing quantum computing into the enterprise is simple: getting the maximum impact from quantum computing now and in the future demands getting the classical part of the computational workflows right. This is the classical elephant in the quantum room: quantum computing requires an immense amount of classical work that goes unnoticed even though its presence looms large, like the proverbial “elephant in the room” that nobody acknowledges.

Of course, optimizing the classical steps in the process requires quantum expertise and awareness. Without that expertise, any hope of quantum speedup can be lost in the classical steps of a workflow. Even if you have the best quantum algorithm, you won’t realize any benefit unless you account for classical overheads and roadblocks and mitigate these problems.

Do you see a continuing trend towards M&A between quantum solution providers?

Yes – it will be interesting to see what happens across the entire stack. We’re seeing a lot of strategic investment and some early consolidation. At the same time, it feels early and there’s still a lot of diversity and fragmentation in the market. At Zapata, we see our position as supporting our strategic partners (hardware, channel, customers, investors), while remaining independent and unbiased. This means we can always build and deploy the right solution on the right technology for a given business problem.

How are you currently sourcing talent?

Zapata has deep relationships in the academic and engineering communities. We recruit from top universities and also some unexpected networks. We are looking for diverse backgrounds across global markets and it’s one of the hardest parts of growing our company.

How far off do you think we are from ‘quantum supremacy’?

It depends on problem types and use cases. It is both here already and far in the future at the same time, and this is both a joke and not a joke at the same time. To get the joke you need to understand superposition. But on a serious note, "quantum supremacy” is here already because in a well-defined way, it has already been demonstrated more than once, and will likely be demonstrated in the future with additional hardware backends coming online. On the other hand, if we define “quantum supremacy” as a circumstance where a quantum computer plays a crucial role in solving a practically valuable problem that is previously intractable, to an extent that brings quantifiable and significant commercial value to the end user, then it is far in the future. But between the two extremes, there is a broad spectrum of use cases in between.

What industries are you seeing the most applications of quantum currently?

Zapata does work across many industries including Aerospace/Automotive, BioPharma, Finance/Banking, Energy, Logistics, and Materials. But we’re seeing more patterns in the types of problems and solutions than the verticals themselves. Specifically, we’re increasingly solving optimization problems with proprietary quantum-classical machine learning methods, and using a higher proportion of classical data structures and compute to create nearer-term solutions for our customers. This reflects our shared desire with customers to create impact with quantum-classical solutions in the next several years.

Where do you seeing the future global centre of quantum?

While there are hot spots emerging around the globe and governments investing heavily in quantum, we don’t think there will be one centre of quantum: we are one global ecosystem. Also, remote work and a naturally global quantum workforce indicate it may remain this way for years to come. Zapata has official presence with legal entities in the US, Canada, Japan and the UK because we see these cities - for now - as major hubs for Quantum and AI/ML.