04 - 09 - 2026

IBM Ventures Invests in BQP as Physics-AI Platform Expands Into Real-Time Operations

IBM Ventures, the venture capital arm of IBM, has invested in BQP, a physics acceleration company developing software designed to speed up high-fidelity physics simulations for time-critical engineering and operational decisions.

The investment takes BQP’s total funding to $8 million and will support the expansion of its flagship BQPhy® platform from engineering design applications into real-time operational deployment. Venn10 Capital and existing investor Monta Vista Capital also participated in the investment.

The investment extends a technical relationship between BQP and IBM that began in 2023, when BQP joined the IBM Quantum Network.

Since its 2025 seed round, BQP said its contracted and committed revenue has increased eightfold, while its customer base has tripled and platform users have grown 20 times. The company said BQPhy is now in production with aerospace and defence customers and is expanding into other industries.

Using Idle GPU Capacity

BQP’s central proposition is that conventional physics solvers often fail to fully utilise available GPU computing capacity. According to the company, classical solvers leave approximately 85% of a GPU’s floating-point capacity unused, largely because sparse iterative methods used in physics simulations are constrained by memory access rather than raw computational capacity.

This can create a trade-off for engineering teams between highly accurate simulations that take too long to produce and faster approaches that simplify or omit parts of the underlying physics.

BQPhy is designed to address this gap through a physics-AI optimisation engine that uses otherwise underutilised GPU capacity to accelerate physics calculations while maintaining what the company describes as full-fidelity modelling.

The platform includes two solvers operating through a common software development kit. It is integrated with MATLAB through the MathWorks Connections Program and provides APIs for Python, Julia and other development frameworks.

Quantum Computing as a Future Path

BQP is also positioning its current technology as a pathway toward quantum computing rather than requiring customers to immediately adopt quantum hardware.

Its QuantumNOW™ platform is currently designed to operate on customers’ existing CPU and GPU infrastructure. The system can also identify computational problems that could eventually benefit from execution on quantum processing units.

The company’s quantum-native QuantumMAX™ solver is still under development and is intended for heterogeneous CPU-GPU-QPU execution.

“An engineer with a deadline doesn’t care where the answer came from. They care that it arrived in time and that the physics is right,” BQP founder and CEO Abhishek Chopra said, arguing that the fundamental challenge is software rather than simply deploying more computing hardware.

IBM Ventures Global Head Emily Fontaine said BQP’s approach provides enterprises with a practical route toward hybrid quantum-classical computing without requiring users to fundamentally change their existing engineering workflows.

Applications in Aerospace and Defence

BQP’s most advanced applications are currently in aerospace and defence, particularly space-related workloads.

Under a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programme with the U.S. Space Force and SpaceWERX, building on earlier work with the SDA TAP Lab, BQP said its physics-AI technology can propagate a catalogue of more than 3,000 space objects in under one second.

The company says the system is approximately 250 times faster than the open-source Orekit solver on the relevant workload, using proprietary algorithms to compress the underlying model.

BQP also has a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Aerospace Systems Directorate and has demonstrated its technology on radio-frequency signal problems for tactical-edge applications with NavalX.

In another aerospace application, BQP worked with Modovolo on propulsion optimisation for unmanned aerial vehicle missions. The system expanded the optimisation problem from three design variables to more than 12, allowing the propeller and motor to be optimised as a combined system.

Expanding Beyond Aerospace

The company is applying the same technology to other high-dimensional physics problems, including energy and battery systems. BQP said its EV battery thermal-management work is being supported by India’s Ministry of Heavy Industries and the Indian School of Business.

The company argues that problems such as satellite trajectory prediction, battery thermal management and data-centre thermal modelling share a common computational challenge: complex physical systems need to be resolved quickly enough to inform operational decisions.

BQP is also continuing research into quantum-enhanced simulation. The company said work presented at USNC/TAM 2026 demonstrated QuantumMAX on quantum hardware for uncertainty quantification in computational fluid dynamics, achieving accuracy comparable to classical Monte Carlo methods with fewer samples on a benchmark-scale problem.

The company said its research has been published through IEEE, AIAA and APL Quantum, alongside recognition at AeroCon 2026 and the IEEE Space, Aerospace and Defence Conference (SPACE 2026).

With IBM Ventures’ investment, BQP is now seeking to scale its physics acceleration platform from engineering workflows into broader operational environments, while maintaining a longer-term pathway toward hybrid classical and quantum computing.