Working Opportunity Fund – November Update
We continue to have a high degree of confidence in the Fund’s portfolio companies and remain laser focused on working with them to generate the best possible returns to shareholders. The top five investments held by the Venture Series are Teradici, D-Wave Systems, Copperleaf, General Fusion and Switch Materials. The Fund’s investments in these private companies are all equity positions and these companies are making significant progress in their respective areas.
D-Wave is a key portfolio company for WOF in both the Venture Series and Commercialization Series. During the quarter, D-Wave has made a number of significant announcements about its progress in providing cloud access to its computers. In short, developers, researchers and businesses around the world can now access several D-Wave Leap quantum cloud platforms and start building applications with both free and paid plans, and below is a summary of the key points from each announcement.
NEC and D-Wave announce they plan to market and sell D-Wave’s Leap™ quantum cloud service (December 10, 2019). NEC is a leader is technology integration and this collaboration “drive development of hybrid services that combine the best features of quantum and classical computers, and make it easy to incorporate quantum capabilities into integrated workflows.” Read our recent blog post on Quantum Computing – Moving into the Mainstream to learn more about the importance of Hybrid Quantum-Classical Systems. Motoo Nishihara, Executive Vice President, CTO, NEC Corporation was quoted as saying, “Our collaboration is aimed at fueling application development and business value today. In addition to the technological value of this partnership, customers will also be provided with great value and we look forward to building further on this collaboration.”
D-Wave announces the expansion of Leap™, its quantum cloud services, into Amazon Braket (December 2, 2019), a new, fully managed Amazon Web Services (AWS) solution that gives scientists, researchers and developers access to begin experimenting with computers from quantum hardware providers in a single place. Simone Severini, Director, Quantum Computing, AWS believes that “…opening up access to current-stage quantum computers is a crucial step in accelerating the development of useful applications”. He added, “That’s why…we chose to collaborate with providers like D-Wave, who have built promising technologies that are of interest to our customers”.
D-Wave announces it will house a Leap™ system at the Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany (October 25, 2019). This will be “the first Leap quantum cloud-based system outside of North America” and will be “the cornerstone of [a] new … lab designed to offer practically usable quantum computers to researchers … throughout Europe”. “At Forschungszentrum Jülich we help to solve highly complex questions from science and industry with high social relevance. We are leaders in the use of supercomputers in simulation, Big Data and AI,” explained Prof. Wolfgang Marquardt, CEO, Forschungszentrum Jülich and having the Leap system located on site will help to accelerate their research and application development.
Learn more about D-Wave’s Leap Quantum Cloud Service here: https://www.dwavesys.com/take-leap
More information about the Working Opportunity Fund
As more information becomes available we will post it on our website here: http://www.penderfund.com/funds/working-opportunity-fund/
If you have more questions about your investment in WOF, please contact Prometa Fund Support Services by phone (888-787-9561), fax (888-747-0984) or email (workingopportunityfund@prometa.ca).
