Vancouver’s 1QBit named to prestigious World Economic Forum list

A Vancouver tech company has joined the ranks of Twitter, Kickstarter, AirBnB and Google.

On Wednesday, the World Economic Forum named Vancouver’s 1QBit as one of the world’s 49 most promising technology pioneers.

Founded in 2012, 1QB Information Technologies makes software for quantum computers. Investors in the company include the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, local peer D-Wave Systems, and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

The Technology Pioneers were selected by a committee of 68 academics, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and corporate executives, including Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and Business Insider editor-in-chief Henry Blodget.

“What QBit has done is act as a bridge between technology at the fundamental level, the new hardware that’s being produced, and the real world applications,” said QBit CEO and co-founder Andrew Fursman.

“The exciting thing about quantum computing is it’s the first real revolution in computing. There’s been a lot of very exciting incremental changes that have happened since the advent of the first computers. some of them have been spectacular, but they’ve all really been based on the same underlying fundamental zero and one technology that ran the very first computers that exist.”

Fursman says this means new efficiencies in a variety of industries.

“A lot of the troubles people are facing with large problems in industries such as finance and even biology really involve the types of combinatorial optimization problems that should be easily addressed by new generations of quantum computing hardware,” he said.

Below: Technology Pioneer 2015 | Andrew Fursman (1QBit)

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