Horizon Quantum Computing Pte. NASDAQ: HQ used its appearance at Needham & Company’s 21st annual Technology, Media, & Consumer Conference to outline its strategy as a newly public quantum software company focused on building infrastructure for developers, hardware providers and end users. Needham senior analyst Quinn Bolton opened the fireside chat by noting that Horizon “recently came public in late March.” Dr. Joe Fitzsimons, Horizon’s founder and chief executive officer, said the company’s mission is to build software infrastructure that enables developers to use quantum computers to solve difficult problems and create value for end users. Fitzsimons said quantum computing hardware has made “tremendous progress” over the past 12 to 18 months, but he added that the industry is not yet at the point where quantum software is running in production and affecting companies’ bottom lines. Horizon’s focus, he said, is on helping the industry get there. Building a Hardware-Agnostic Software Layer Fitzsimons described Horizon as sitting “at the heart of the ecosystem” by connecting developers, hardware providers and end users. The company is building programming languages and compilers designed to take code written by developers and compile it for a range of quantum computers. Horizon also aims to package quantum programs as web APIs so they can be incorporated into user-facing software. He said one of the main challenges in quantum computing is that current programming approaches often require developers to work at a very low level, assembling quantum programs one logic gate at a time. Existing frameworks such as Qiskit and Cirq use Python to help generate quantum circuits, but Fitzsimons said those approaches remain limited because “not all of computation is circuits.” Horizon’s approach, he said, is to design programming languages for an ideal future quantum computer, then build compilers and runtime capabilities that allow those programs