Insider Brief
- Extropic has announced a $14.1M Seed funding round to develop a new computing paradigm that integrates generative AI with the physics of the world, using out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics and aims to redefine computation from a physics-first perspective, optimizing for efficiency in space, time, and energy.
- The team at Extropic, formed from experts in Physics and AI, including those who have transitioned from quantum computing, is working to create a computer that leverages natural entropy and is self-programming.
- The funding round, led by Steve Jang and Kindred Ventures, includes participation from several venture capital firms and notable angel investors.
PRESS RELEASE — December 4, 2023 — A ton of engineering work has been poured into making various devices we use every day more precise, more reliable, more accurate, less noisy.
The latter comes at a great spatial, temporal, and energetic cost.
As generative AI begins to eat the world, our appetite for scalable, cheaper, faster, and more efficient compute is becoming insatiable.
One then wonders, given the dawn of the Generative-AI-first era, could we fundamentally reimagine what is a “computer”?
One could imagine a computer which, instead of suppressing the natural entropy of the world, achieves symbiosis with it, leveraging it as an asset.
One could imagine a computer which, instead of being imperatively programmed, naturally finds a way to program itself to learn representations of the world.
One could imagine a computer that is so efficient that it would truly enable us to scale Generative AI to the world, circumventing the need to massively scale energy production.
One could imagine a computer inspired by nature, one that draws inspiration from how life, driven by thermodynamics and self-organization, always finds a way.
At Extropic, we set out to build such a computer.
More precisely, we are building a computing paradigm which harnesses the power of out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics to fundamentally merge generative AI with the physics of the world.
This is a fundamental redefinition of computation in a full stack fashion, from tokens to electrons, via a physics-first view.
Our goal is simple: achieve the ultimate embedding of generative AI into physical processes of the world, achieving the limits of efficiency in terms of space, time, and energy, as defined by the laws of physics.
If you seek to push the physical limits of generative AI, consider joining us on this journey.
Who we are
Our team was formed as an AI expedition effort at the frontiers of Physics, combining scientists and engineers with backgrounds primarily in Physics and AI, with several key members coming from a scientific exodus from quantum computing.
As the timelines to scalability for quantum physics-based computers grew endlessly longer and longer, many of our team sought a different path to practical physics-based computing. One that is not reliant on quantum mechanics, one where noise is an asset rather than a liability, one where a miracle in device physics is not required to reach industrial scale.
Extropic was founded in 2022 by Guillaume Verdon, Extropic CEO. Before founding Extropic, Guillaume was the quantum tech lead within the Physics & AI team at Alphabet’s X. He pioneered a plethora of quantum technologies with wide-ranging applications from perception, communication, and representation learning. Guillaume is regarded as a pioneer of the field of quantum deep learning, founding what later became Google’s TensorFlow Quantum project during his PhD at the University of Waterloo, eventually joining Google Quantum AI. He comes from a broader background in theoretical physics and information theory, with a Master’s from Perimeter Institute and the Institute for Quantum Computing.
Trevor McCourt, Extropic CTO, was originally a mechanical engineer who first met Guillaume when joining the founding team of the TensorFlow Quantum project while at UWaterloo. The two of them worked closely to pioneer differentiable quantum programming software from zero to one. Trevor then returned to the hardware engineering side, developing cutting edge devices and control techniques at Google Quantum AI. Ultimately, Trevor sought to find meaning in self-organizing physical systems, doing PhD work at MIT studying the role of noise in computational and living systems.
Christopher Chamberland, Extropic Principal Architect, is widely regarded as one of the most eminent Quantum Computer architects. After leading efforts to define the core quantum architectures and roadmaps for both AWS and IBM Quantum, he decided to leave the field of Quantum Computing to lead the architecture efforts for Extropic. Before AWS and IBM, Christopher worked at Microsoft Quantum and received a PhD from the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing.
The broader team is a set of scientists and engineers with backgrounds in Physics and AI primarily, with prior experience from AWS, Meta, IBM, Nvidia, Xanadu, and many of the world’s top academic institutions.
This highly interdisciplinary team with extensive experience in physics-based AI across the stack is uniquely positioned to pioneer the unified approach to Physics and AI pursued at Extropic.
Our backers
We are excited to announce our Series Seed round totalling $14.1M, led by Steve Jang and Kindred Ventures (Uber, Coinbase, Humane), with participation from Buckley Ventures (Rippling, Figma, Vercel, Mercury), HOF Capital, Julian Capital, Marque VC, OSS Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Weekend Fund, and several others.
Amongst its angel investors, we are excited to have Aidan Gomez (Cohere), Amjad Masad (Replit) Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox), Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Balaji Srinivasan (Coinbase), Bryan Johnson, Chris Prucha (Notion), Farbood Nivi, Garry Tan (YC), Ivan Zhang (Cohere), Naval Ravikant, Oliver Cameron (Voyage), Packy McCormick, Scott Belsky (Adobe), Tobias Lutke (Shopify), and many more on board.
We are grateful to have such a broad base of investors committed to advancing the frontiers of computing. We look forward to accelerating the advent of our computational paradigm with this Seed capital.
