Israel, a small country, is generating big ideas in science and technology, including the emerging field of quantum computing. In this article I write about my interview with Classiq, their mission and products, my impressions from my visit to Israel, as well as its position in the international arena as an entrepreneurial power.
Image source: College of Charleston
My first time in the Middle East: Impressions of Tel Aviv
In January 2023, I departed from my hometown, Tirana, Albania, and I stopped for a two-day visit to Israel, before going back to New York, where I am pursuing my Ph.D. studies at NYU.
For many years I had read so much about Israel, I was familiar with its history and culture, its language Hebrew, and even its music (I'm a die-hard fan of the Israeli singer, Ofra Haza). The famous book, "The Startup Nation", written by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, was my first window to the inspiring startup world of Israeli society and Israeli innovation. As a student of physics and quantum computing, I have always kept myself informed on the recent developments in the world, including Israel, especially regarding new startups in quantum technologies. One of these companies was Classiq, the company that I was going to visit soon.
My dream of visiting the "Holy Land" finally became a reality. After leaving the Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv-Yafo, a polyglot node which connects the West to the East and where you will hear English, Russian, Arabic, French, Italian, etc, I headed to the Classiq headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Before writing about my visit to Classiq, first I would like to describe my impressions of Tel Aviv. Most of its inhabitants (Jews and Arabs) speak good English, but some of them feel more comfortable with Russian, since their families returned from Russia to Israel. It's definitely a very dynamic city, with its center hosting arts and culture institutions, new skyscrapers and old houses which give you a sense of nostalgia. It has good infrastructure, great nightlife, and a welcoming atmosphere for people of different backgrounds.
The center of Tel Aviv, near Classiq's headquarters
Nightlife in Tel Aviv
I found Tel Aviv to be a modern, friendly and open-minded city, and I felt safe walking around as a tourist at night. A big plus: you will see many cats in the streets.
If you are looking for something historical, you should definitely check out Jaffa (Yafo in Hebrew), which is the Southern and the oldest part of the city. I recommend having lunch or dinner there, the food is unique, and the atmosphere is amazing (yeap, even in January). The distance from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is less than 1 hour, and the trip is quite comfortable and pleasant.
A few words about Classiq
Founded in 2020 by Nir Minerbi, Amir Naveh and Dr. Yehuda Naveh, Classiq was listed as one of the top software-focused quantum technologies companies by The Quantum Insider, and it was named as one of tomorrow's top growth companies by Qumra Capital. Their focus is on quantum algorithms, more precisely they have built a platform that helps simplify the design and optimization of quantum circuits according to the user's needs and goals. Its Quantum Algorithm Design platform (quantum analog of classical CAD) helps users translate a high-level functional description, e.g., a code that defines an arithmetic function, number of qubits, optimization criteria (such as circuit width and depth), into a quantum circuit. As a result, the user will not bother about what quantum gates to use and how to use them; they will only think of the end goal, what they want the algorithm to do, its features and its optimization criteria. The Classiq's QAD platform will take care of the implementation details. In the figure below, we see a high-level functional description in the form of a quantum arithmetic code fragment, and in the right we can see the quantum circuit that corresponds to it, synthesized by Classiq's QAD.
Suppose you have several constraints to fulfill, such as a favorite type of quantum gate sets, a desired accuracy, circuit width and depth, and the connectivity between quantum gates. If you were to generate a circuit by hand for every combination of constraints, this would take you many days. You may not like the output for a certain combination of constraints, because the circuit may be too deep for example, and you would need to adjust the accuracy to deal with this problem.
Thanks to Classiq's platform, the job of generating the best options that fulfill your constraints and that correspond to the high-level functional model you have defined, will take you seconds instead of days. How amazing is that!
My visit at Classiq
I was welcomed to the headquarters of Classiq by Simon Fried, the VP Business Development and Marketing. Even though it was a late afternoon of the 2nd of January, two days after the New Year's Eve, there were still some employees working in the offices. I was astonished to find a colorful and welcoming environment, with a spectacular view of the fast-growing center of Tel Aviv.
Photos from a late afternoon at Classiq's headquarters in Tel Aviv
During my interview with Classiq's Simon Fried, I asked him about the main advantages and disadvantages of their platform. Classiq's QAD is a great tool if you want to get things done efficiently, but if you are a researcher who wants to learn more about the intricacies of quantum circuits, this may not be your best choice. Classiq's QAD platform is useful in real-life and industrial applications where the user has a clear goal in mind, which needs to be fulfilled using quantum circuits. However, noise still remains a problem for NISQ (noisy intermediate-scale quantum) devices. At this stage, error mitigation remains the most practical and efficient method to deal with errors, with error correction expected to take its place in the future. When asked about this matter, Fried informed me that Classiq is collaborating with the Q-CTRL company to implement quantum error mitigation. We also discussed about the successful collaboration between Classiq, Nvidia and Rolls-Royce. Aerospace companies such as Rolls-Royce work with computational fluid dynamics problems (CFD), where they have to simulate fluid and gas phenomena. Optimization of aerodynamics and thermodynamics is a crucial tool in improving advanced equipment design. There exists a quantum algorithm, HHL (Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd), which solves a linear set of equations, and which can be used in a hybrid classical/quantum computer implementation of CFD. This is where Classiq's platform comes into play. Classiq provides an efficient implementation of the linear problem definition into the quantum circuit and generates optimized circuits for the different quantum functions within the HHL algorithm. Using the Classiq platform, Rolls-Royce is developing state-of-the-art optimized quantum circuits for the HHL algorithm. According to Fried, the time-saving is significantly larger as the generation of the circuit with Classiq takes from seconds to minutes whereas the manual approach could easily take weeks! Rolls-Royce and Classiq recently have applied classical and quantum methods to design jet engines, where these tools help perform better calculations. The circuit in this project was designed using Classiq's synthesis engine and it was simulated using NVIDIA® A100 Tensor Core GPUs. It measures 10 million layers deep, and it has 39 qubits, making it the world’s largest quantum computing circuit designed and simulated for computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
You can read more about this topic on the very recent article published on NVIDIA's website.
We talked about the skills that Classiq is looking for. According to Simon Fried, there is a combination of different skills that enables the success of Classiq, such as expertise on high-performance computing, hybrid computing, circuit synthesis, etc.
We also discussed company's vision for the future. Classiq is looking to continue expanding the range of back-ends that it connects to seamlessly, is placing an increased emphasis on the power of its Analyzer feature to visually represent circuits and is also expanding the libraries included in its new lo-code IDE environment. Also, they are looking to expand to other locations,
currently with representation in Amsterdam (NL), and NY (USA); the next office is planned for Japan.
Classiq's collaboration with academia and opportunities for students
Shortly after I returned to New York, some other students at the physics department of New York University and I held a Zoom meeting with the Classiq team. Their goal is to offer their platform and services to the academia, such as students and researchers. During our meeting, organized by Eden Schirman, manager of Classiq for Academia, we installed the Classiq Platform and used it on Jupyter notebooks to execute and optimize quantum algorithms, playing with different constraints and having the most optimal circuit generated by the platform. The link for the academic registration, free for academic users, is the following: https://www.classiq.io/academia.
Interested in being updated and engaged with Classiq's events?
Classiq organizes coding competitions, usually during the summer, and they offer prizes for the winners. Also, the company was one of the sponsors of the QHACK 2023 hackathon, where it offered an in-person or remote internship for the winner of the "Quantum Computing Today!" challenge.
Israel is generating many successful companies in quantum computing. Some honorable mentions are Quantum Machines, Quantum Source, Lightsolver, and Qedma.
The Israeli Startup Wonder
A simple search on Google on the countries that are leading in the startup ecosystem will give you a list of big countries, such as U.S., U.K, Canada, etc., plus Israel, whose population reached 9.364 million in 2021. According to Crunchbase, Israel is part of the "Big 4" startup countries during 2022, keeping similar trends as in 2021. Statista ranks Israel in third place in the list of leading countries for startups worldwide in 2022, by total score, after the U.S. and the U.K. Startup Genome ranks Tel Aviv in the 7th place in the list of Global Startup Ecosystems for 2022, holding the same position as the previous year, arguing that "the Israeli ecosystem saw three $1 billion exits in the period examined, crossing $100 billion in total Ecosystem Value this year."
Looking at the factors behind the Israeli success in startups, a famous proverb comes to my mind: "Necessity is the mother of invention". The book "The Startup Nation" explains the difficulties that Jewish immigrants faced when they returned from Europe to their ancestor's land. Doctors, engineers, artists, technicians, writers, politicians, left their houses in Western and Eastern Europe to build a new life on the dunes of Tel Aviv and in other cities of Israel, facing extraordinary difficulties. The Jewish population gradually converted those dunes into houses, parks and schools, hospitals, research centers, skyscrapers, and advanced infrastructure. They drilled for water from the underground, literally creating life on the desert, as well as desalinated the sea water, using intelligent ways to solve the water crisis in a Middle Eastern country with limited water resources. Surviving and thriving required a tremendous amount of courage, initiative, resourcefulness and Chutzpah, which is a Hebrew and Yiddish name that means audacity, boldness, and a very high level of self-confidence, all the things you need to come up with ingenious solutions and leave your mark in the world. As years went by, Israel had to develop methods to survive in a very hostile political environment. These conditions of natural hazards, plus continuous conflicts and threat from outside political factors, have led to the necessity of inventing innovative ways of defense, which stem from technological advancement. But the Israeli technological progress goes beyond the military realm. Many examples of successful Israeli startups in healthcare and other fields, are given by Avi Jorisch in his book "Thou Shalt Innovate - How Israeli Ingenuity Repairs the World". An example that really struck me, was the case of Eli Beer, a Jewish Israeli citizen who founded the United Hatzalah ("Rescue" in Hebrew), a company that consists of a highly trained network of medics, paramedics, and ambulance drivers, that are able to treat victims almost immediately all over Israel. The novelty consists of the fact that they don't operate using standard ambulances. During traffic jams, ambulances get stuck in traffic. He created the so-called "ambucycle", part ambulances, part motorcycles. He invited several similar organizations in different parts of Israel to join forces. Jewish ambulances cannot enter certain Arab neighborhoods unaccompanied, and this delay is often critical for the victims who need immediate medical assistance. An Arab medic, Muhammad Asli and his nurse friend Murad Alyan, met with Eli Beer and joined United Hatzalah to operate in the Arab neighborhoods. Now, United Hatzalah serves all the communities of Israel - the Jews, the Druze, Christians, and Muslims.
Another example that I really loved, was the case of the PillCam, created by Gavriel Iddan and Gavriel Meron, a camera in capsule, used to visualize the colon and the small intestine, replacing the uncomfortable and inaccurate existing technology: endoscopes. The book has many other inspiring cases of Israeli inventions and startups in various areas. One that I particularly like is the case of ReWalk, a company that replaces wheelchairs with devices that help paraplegics walk, and even race.
Another book that I recommend in order to learn more about the startup ecosystem in Israel, is "The Unstoppable Startup - Mastering Israel's Secret Rules of Chutzpah", written by Uri Adoni. It gives insight and advice on how to apply the Chutzpah principles to your business model. I will list here the Chutzpah principles elaborated in the book:
Challenge reality and the status quo.
Dominate the market category you are after or create a new one.
Foresee the future and innovate to meet its demands.
The market needs it (even if it doesn't know it yet).
Bend the rules.
Show, don't tell.
The author gives examples of successful Israeli startups on areas such as military defense (the Iron Dome case), aerospace, ecology, cybersecurity, etc. Differently from Avi Jorisch's book, it offers more detailed entrepreneurial advice such as the phases that startups go through.
Many STEM professors and researchers who work in Israeli universities, such as The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Weizmann Institute of Science, Tel Aviv University, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Ben Gurion University, Bar Ilan University, University of Haifa, etc., prestigious and well-ranked institutions, are contributing to the birth and growth of these successful startups. As a matter of fact, the strong Israeli education in science and technology, with well-ranked academic institutions, is one of the factors behind the country's success in entrepreneurship and technological innovation.
Israeli international collaborations and investments
I want to conclude this article with some exciting news from my hometown, Tirana, the capital city of Albania. The mayor of Tirana, Erion Veliaj and the Minister of Finance and Economy of Albania, Delina Ibrahimaj, presented a new project called the "Technology and Economy Development Area" (TEDA), which will be constructed in Kashar, 3 km (1.86 miles) away from Tirana and 12 km (7.45 miles) from Mother Teresa Airport. The goal is to develop novel technologies such as automobiles, software design, electronics, information technology, biotechnology, etc., in Tirana. Some of the potential clients will be foreign companies, mainly from Israel and the USA, but also from other countries such as Italy and the Netherlands. The importance of the collaboration with Israel is its expertise in communications and information technologies. The construction of this project will start in 2023 and is predicted to create up to 7000 new jobs. More information on this project can be found on teda.tirana.al.
Image source: teda.tirana.al