Amongst the fast-growing entanglement of quantum computing companies, Riverlane has always stood apart. Maybe it’s our signature green colour and hypnotically transmogrifying quantum ‘orb’, eliciting the mysterious subatomic world where tiny quantum particles hold the hidden secrets of our natural world.
Or maybe it’s just the freshness (and rare Q-lessness) of our name, taken from the Cambridge Street where Steve Brierley founded the company at his kitchen table in 2016. Since then, over 120 of the world’s quantum scientists, engineers, and even a few top marketeers, have joined to accelerate the journey.
For these and many more reasons, Riverlane has been one of the world’s leading quantum computing companies for nearly a decade.
So why change our brand?
Because we need tell a bold fresh story, verbally and visually, that aligns with our critical role in moving quantum from its dream phase to lived reality. The story is necessarily about more than the power and purpose of our product. It’s also a story about working across the quantum ecosystem to unlock this new age of human progress, far sooner than was previously imagined possible.
Riverlane was founded to develop applications that would run on the world’s first quantum computers. Correctly, as history has proven, we identified a quantum ‘Moore’s law’ showing quantum computing capacity was grow exponentially year on year. Revolutionary applications – designing lifesaving new drugs in days rather than discovering them over decades, for example – seemed within reach.
But on that we were wrong.
Even as more quantum computing companies sprung up around the world, accelerated by tens of billions in government and private capital, quantum computers ran up against an insurmountable problem. Errors. Specifically, the fragile nature of the quantum bits (or qubits) that give them their computational superpowers meant that all quantum computers failed under an accumulating avalanche of data errors – long before they could achieve useful scale.
There’s a solution. It’s called Quantum Error Correction technology, or QEC. And a there’s a company that’s solving QEC. Riverlane.
Riverlane turned its full attention to QEC five years ago. At the time it seemed a radical move. Most experts believed the error problem was just too hard to ever solve. More than one, including our own chief scientist, called QEC ‘the hardest problem our species has ever tried to solve.’
Fast forward four years and we’re now in quantum computing’s ‘Error Correction Era’. QEC – the process of encoding qubits to flag and then decode vast volumes of quantum errors in real-time – is accepted by all as the key to unlocking quantum scale. Said another way, QEC has changed from ‘technology I may need some day’ to urgent technology I need explore today.
Riverlane is leading this change. As the world leader in QEC technology, we already partner with over 60% of the world’s leading quantum computer companies. Our mission – to master quantum error correction and unlock a new age of human progress – is now within reach. The first steps into this new age are years, not decades, away.
We now express our mission in a simple way: ‘Decode Quantum, Recode the World’.
Our new brand expresses this unique concept in a simple, dynamic, beautiful way. It has a clear visual language that tells stories of the technology, the transformational applications it can unlock and the partnerships that bring it to life.
I’ve worked with some transformational brands, including O2, iPhone, Trustpilot and 5Rights. Riverlane can be as transformational as all of them. Perhaps more so.
Thank you and congratulations to my colleagues Amy Flower, Emilia Conlon, Gemma Church, Abe Asfaw, Tom Hartley, Eve Townsend and Steve Brierley for their bold and innovative thinking. Huge thanks, too, to our partners venturethree for their wonderful creativity and strategic wisdom.