About Xanadu
Xanadu is a Toronto-based quantum computing company founded in 2016 and a leader in photonic quantum computing. Its Borealis machine demonstrated quantum computational advantage in Nature in 2022, and its modular Aurora system, published in Nature in 2025, networks photonic chips into what Xanadu describes as the first scalable, networked quantum computer.
Xanadu also builds PennyLane, the leading open-source framework for differentiable quantum programming. PennyLane treats quantum circuits the way machine learning treats neural networks: it integrates with PyTorch and JAX so you can train hybrid quantum-classical models end to end.
PennyLane Lightning is the framework's high-performance simulation suite, written in C++. Its headline feature is adjoint differentiation, which computes analytic gradients in a single forward and reverse pass instead of two circuit executions per parameter with the parameter-shift rule. That makes it the natural choice for variational algorithms and quantum machine learning.