Phasecraft

A materials scientist uploads the molecular structure of a promising battery electrode compound. Within hours, a quantum simulation returns data on electron behavior that would take a classical supercomputer months to approximate at the same level of accuracy. The quantum computer running this simulation is not a future machine; it is one of today’s noisy, error-prone NISQ devices, made capable by an algorithm specifically engineered to extract maximum results within the strict time limits imposed by current hardware. This is Phasecraft’s THRIFT algorithm running in production, and it is this concrete, peer-reviewed advance that earned Phasecraft a 2026 Global Recognition Award. The company raised $34 million in Series B funding in September 2025, co-led by Plural, Playground Global, and Novo Holdings’ Quantum Fund in its first direct quantum software investment, with total capital raised surpassing €42.7 million.

Technical Innovation and Architecture

Phasecraft‘s technical strategy rests on a precise observation about the quantum computing field: hardware improvements and algorithm improvements are the two independent inputs to quantum advantage, and the industry has invested orders of magnitude more capital in the former than the latter. The company’s founding professors, each with over 20 years at the forefront of quantum information theory, built Phasecraft to close that gap systematically. The THRIFT algorithm, published in Nature Communications in 2025, demonstrates this approach concretely: by recognizing that atomic and molecular interactions evolve at different speeds, THRIFT channels computational resources where they matter most, reduces the total number of quantum gates required for simulation, and decreases the accumulation of errors that terminate calculations prematurely on today’s imperfect hardware. The result is quantum simulations of battery materials, solar cell compounds, and catalysts that run on current NISQ devices at a depth previously achievable only with theoretical future fault-tolerant machines.

The second major proprietary advance, DQI (Decoded Quantum Interferometry), addresses optimization rather than simulation. DQI converts quantum optimization problems into classical decoding tasks solvable by existing powerful methods and has outperformed classical optimization techniques, including simulated annealing, in benchmark tests, with demonstrated potential for exponential quantum speedup in specific problem classes directly relevant to large-scale energy network optimization. Phasecraft has also developed hybrid methods combining quantum computation with density functional theory, enabling accurate simulation of electron behavior in complex chemical systems at lower computational cost than either Quantumium, as well as every other major quantum architecture, making Phasecraft the software layer that simultaneously improves the commercial value of every hardware platform, purely quantum or purely classical approaches alone. All three of these advances are hardware-agnostic, running on IBM, Google, Quantinuum, and every other major quantum architecture, making Phasecraft the software layer that improves the commercial value of every hardware platform simultaneously.

Market Strategy and Leadership

CEO Professor Ashley Montanaro, CTO Professor Toby Cubitt, and co-founder Professor John Morton left their full professorships at the University of Bristol and UCL in 2019, specifically because they recognized that closing the gap between quantum theory and quantum applications required a company structure, not a university department. Their combined research records span quantum complexity theory, quantum many-body physics, and electron-spin qubit hardware, providing a founding-team depth that no competing quantum software company has assembled. The Series B investor syndicate reflects the caliber of that scientific foundation: Playground Global was co-founded by Bill Maris, creator of Google Ventures who funded DeepMind; Plural is led by Ian Hogarth, former Chair of the UK AI Safety Institute, who has publicly described algorithm improvements as “the less capital-intensive path to quantum advantage”; and Novo Holdings’ Quantum Fund chose Phasecraft as its first direct quantum software investment.

Phasecraft’s commercial strategy is structured around two parallel tracks that reinforce each other. Industrial end users in materials science, pharmaceuticals, and energy receive algorithm deployments and simulation services for specific high-value problems. Quantum hardware providers, including IBM and Google, receive algorithm optimization that improves the commercial performance of their platforms, creating joint incentive structures that keep Phasecraft embedded at the frontier of hardware development. As qubit counts rise and coherence times extend across the hardware landscape, Phasecraft’s algorithms extract disproportionately more value from each hardware generation than unoptimized software running on the same machines. The Novo Holdings relationship accelerates the pharmaceutical track: Phasecraft’s molecular simulation capabilities for drug discovery are directly relevant to genetic condition research programs across Novo’s life sciences portfolio.

Industry Impact and Future Vision

Phasecraft’s impact on the quantum computing industry is both methodological and commercial. By publishing THRIFT in Nature Communications with full technical transparency, the company demonstrated that meaningful quantum-simulation improvements are achievable on today’s hardware through algorithmic innovation alone, without waiting for the next generation of chips. This shifts the industry’s timeline for when quantum computing becomes commercially useful: if algorithm improvements extend the effective capability of current NISQ devices by the margins THRIFT demonstrates, applications in battery design, drug discovery, and energy optimization move from “possible in 2030” to deployable now. DQI’s exponential speedup benchmark results in optimization problems provide a second independent proof point in a different application domain, confirming that Phasecraft’s algorithmic advances are not limited to a single problem class.

The Series B capital is being deployed to double Phasecraft’s R&D output and build industrial-scale solutions for end users, moving from research publication to commercial deployment at the pace the company’s algorithm quality already justifies. A US presence is expanding alongside the UK base, positioning Phasecraft to engage with both European industrial clients and the US quantum research and investment ecosystem simultaneously. The 2026 Global Recognition Award recognizes a company whose founders left the world’s best university quantum research programs, not because academia could not produce the science, but because only a company could deliver it to the industries that need it most, fast enough to matter.