Unitary Fund 2023 Annual Report

To the Unitary Fund community,

Last fall, we hosted our inaugural unitaryCon, bringing together our microgrant recipients and community members for the first time in person. This event underscored the importance of our shared vision for a better future through technology and the vital role of our growing, diverse community in realizing this vision. People build quantum technology. And our focus is on nurturing that emerging community of people.

This community now spans the 100+ microgrant winners from 25+ countries, the unitaryHack participants, the thousands online on Discords, youtube, and social media, the maintainers and bug fixers on github, the unpaid and constructive peer reviewers, the graduate students going the extra mile to upload tutorial code along with their arXiv papers, and the many supporters from often competing companies who understand where and why we need to all work together. Your contributions are invaluable and recognized.

This year we have grown and expanded our programs:

• Mitiq, our quantum error mitigation compiler, surpassed 100k downloads, with contributions from 67 individuals
• unitaryHack grew to 700 participants from 80+ countries, awarding 99 bounties across 33 projects
• Our second Quantum Open Source Software Survey tracked developments in the developer ecosystem
• Metriq introduced new tools for tracking state-of-the-art metrics and resource estimates in quantum technology
• We awarded a record 23 microgrants for projects ranging from quantum error correction tools to Open Quantum Hardware, a field surveyed in our whitepaper

And much more that you will read about in the full 2023 annual report.

Our whitepaper on quantum computing’s risks and benefits highlights the field’s potential for economically impactful computations before cryptographically relevant ones. Let us work together towards that future.

Thanks to all of you who have joined us in this mission.

We are just getting started,

William Zeng, PhD

President, Unitary Fund