Quantum software startup RhymeQ has raised $2.2M in a pre-seed round to build Rhyme, a tool that lets ordinary software developers write quantum programs in Python. Ground State Ventures, an Amsterdam venture firm that backs early-stage quantum startups, led the round.
Two Munich investors, Vanagon Ventures and freiraum ventures, joined in, along with Plug and Play from Sunnyvale, California. RhymeQ is based in Karlsruhe, a university city in south-western Germany, and in Zürich, Switzerland. It plans to spend the money on more engineers, an enterprise version of Rhyme, a worldwide developer community and tie-ups with quantum hardware makers.
The startup came out of stealth at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Berlin, where it launched Rhyme. The company says anyone with basic Python skills can use it, because its compilers turn that code into instructions a quantum machine can run.
“We are on a mission to make quantum computers programmable by every developer on the planet,” said Daniel Volz, its co-founder and chief executive.
Quantum Code Without The Physics
Ordinary computers store information as bits, each one a 0 or a 1. Quantum computers use qubits, which can hold a mix of both states at once and be linked to each other. That gives them a different way of working through certain problems, but it also makes them hard to program.
Writing for them usually means working close to the machine, building circuits step by step from gates, the basic operations that change the state of qubits. Volz contrasts that with vibe coding, where people describe software to artificial intelligence (AI) assistants that write it.
“While vibe coding is taking over the classical programming world, the situation is not so simple in the quantum world,” he said. “Quantum circuits can only be debugged by PhD-level physicists.”
Rhyme lets developers write and debug quantum applications “without touching qubits, gates, or physics”, RhymeQ says.
They describe the problem using high-level data types, and Rhyme compiles, or automatically translates, that description into quantum circuits. According to the company’s website, it works inside a developer’s usual coding editor and alongside AI coding assistants.
Built On NVIDIA’s CUDA-Q
Rhyme does not talk to quantum chips directly. It compiles to CUDA-Q, NVIDIA’s open-source platform for programs that mix ordinary processors, graphics chips and quantum processors in one piece of code. NVIDIA says CUDA-Q works with 75% of publicly available quantum processors.
For RhymeQ, that means the same Rhyme code can run on simulators powered by graphics processing units (GPUs) or on real quantum hardware. The startup calls Rhyme hardware-agnostic, so users are not tied to one maker’s machines. It has also joined NVIDIA Inception, the chipmaker’s programme for startups, but has not named the hardware companies it plans to work with.
IBM’s Qiskit and Google’s Cirq, both open-source toolkits, already let developers program quantum machines in Python. Their core building block is the quantum circuit, which developers assemble from gates. RhymeQ says Rhyme sits a level above that, generating the circuits from a description of the task.
Quantum Types From A 2024 Paper
Tamás Varga, RhymeQ’s co-founder and chief technology officer, first set out the idea in a research paper with two colleagues at the Constructor Institute in Schaffhausen, a town in northern Switzerland. It proposed “quantum types” for a developer-friendly language called Rhyme, and was presented at a quantum software engineering workshop in Lisbon in April 2024.
The paper argues that thinking in qubits and gates holds many developers back. Its answer is to give programmers quantum versions of the data types they already know, such as bits, integers, characters, arrays and strings, so they can reason about a program the way they would in any other language.
Founders From Kipu, UBS And Swiss Re
Varga worked as a senior software developer at the bank UBS and the reinsurer Swiss Re, and holds a doctorate from the University of Bern. Volz, who has a chemistry doctorate from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, helped build McKinsey’s quantum practice and led the quantum programme at the chemicals group BASF.
He then co-founded Kipu Quantum, a German quantum software company, and ran it as chief executive. The third co-founder, Christina Wu, is chief operating officer and handles operations, finance and partnerships. Her background includes co-founding Papafut Quantum and leadership roles at energy, pharmaceutical and healthcare startups.
Lead Investor Sees A Skills Gap
Ground State Ventures, called QDNL Participations until its rebrand this year, has raised $88M so far for its fund for early-stage quantum startups. Kris Kaczmarek, a partner at the firm, said that while the gap between quantum algorithms and hardware is closing, his firm keeps hearing “who cares if no one knows how to use them”. “This is the gap RhymeQ is closing,” he said.
RhymeQ says it already works with large enterprise design partners in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and mobility, without naming them. Its website adds that more than 25 industrial companies are in active talks with it, and it runs an online forum for developers who want to try quantum programming.
For now, RhymeQ has fresh backing from quantum and deep-tech investors, a Python layer built on NVIDIA’s CUDA-Q, and a set of unnamed industrial partners to test it with. Its partner claims, and its promise of quantum code without physics, all come from the company itself.
Its founders want ordinary developers to program quantum computers in a language they already know. Rhyme, which began as an academic paper, is their way of getting there, now with investor money and a place in NVIDIA’s startup programme.
