Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos has put money into a robot factory worker, a 10,000 year clock and private car service. And he’s not done yet.

Bezos Expeditions and In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA, announced Thursday a $30 million investment in D-Wave Systems, a Vancouver-based company that develops quantum-computing applications.

D-Wave Systems integrates computer science and physics discoveries with new-age computational processes. It’s focused on solving “optimization” problems, like finding out the most efficient delivery routes or how protein atoms interact with drug compounds. Some say the technology is more efficient than classical computing.

The company’s bluechip product is the D-Wave One system, the first commercial quantum computing system on the market. It is designed for industrial problems encountered by Fortune 500 companies, government and academia.

Controversy has followed the technology and its quantum properties over the past few years. But things are looking good now: D-Wave published some data last year to prove that its chip could perform quantum-mechanical computations and now has a nice chunk of change to work with. Other investors include Business Development Bank of Canada, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Goldman Sachs, and Growthworks.

More on what D-Wave is up to in this MIT Technology Review story, with editor Tom Simonite reporting that if the startup meets with success “some of the world’s thorniest computing problems, such as the hunt for new drugs or efforts to build artificial intelligence, would become dramatically less challenging.:

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