Toronto · Quantum software · Est. 2016
Artiste-qb.net builds open-source tools that turn Python into a full quantum computing toolbox: quantum Bayesian networks, circuit compilers and simulators, quantum neural networks, and a curated cloud workstation for data scientists.
Background: a live quantum Bayesian network. Each node carries a complex amplitude; hue shows its phase.
Origin
In 1997 Robert R. Tucci posted a short paper to arXiv proposing Quantum Bayesian Nets: a way to draw quantum systems as the same directed graphs that Judea Pearl had made standard for classical probability.
Tucci built a Mac application called Quantum Fog to explore them, then paused it in 2006. A decade later, in September 2016, he and Henning Dekant, a quantum industry writer who had been covering the field on his blog Wavewatching since 2011, founded Artiste to bring the idea back as open-source Python.
The founding group grew to include Simon Bermudez and Tao Yin, with backgrounds spanning theoretical high-energy physics, machine learning, and biomedical engineering. The pitch was an "early bird" bet: build the developer tooling before quantum hardware went mainstream, so that companies could start experimenting on classical machines and switch to real qubits later.
Create and curate an open-source analytics platform that empowers data scientists to augment Python into a full-blown quantum computing toolbox.Company mission, via The Quantum Insider
Timeline
Dates come from arXiv, the USPTO, the founders' own posts, GitHub commit history and press coverage.
Robert R. Tucci generalizes Bayesian networks to the quantum regime.
Tucci patents a graphical computer method for analyzing quantum systems and describes compiling QB nets into sequences of elementary quantum operations, the seed of Qubiter.
The original C++ Quantum Fog application stops development.
Henning Dekant announces the company with Bob Tucci, built around an open-source quantum Bayesian network framework on GitHub.
Work with medical researcher Andrew Deonarine on a health analytics platform using quantum-accelerated Bayesian networks for predictive and pandemic analytics.
Artiste starts developing software against D-Wave's API.
Artiste joins CDL's inaugural quantum machine learning stream, kicked off at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto.
Bermudez, Dekant and Horlacher file for a platform that distributes compute to web-capable devices.
A QNN library built on TensorFlow and Edward ships, and BayesForge goes live as a curated machine image on AWS Marketplace.
Patent protection runs until October 2037. The Quantum Insider profiles the company the same month.
QFog-Pyodide and a JupyterLite Docker image move the tooling into WebAssembly. In April, The Quantum Insider names Artiste one of 12 quantum startups born and bred in Toronto.
Qubiter remains the organization's most-starred project.
artiste-qb.net shows a “coming soon” page with a Q3 2026 launch target.
Products
Everything runs on a classical computer today and targets gate-model quantum hardware from IBM, Google and others when it is ready.
Tools for reading, writing, compiling and simulating quantum circuits. Circuits live as human-readable text files with ASCII pictures you can edit by hand.
Model physical situations that show quantum behaviour using classical and quantum Bayesian networks. Built for quantum mechanics teaching and research in quantum AI, chemistry and cognition.
Supervised learning with quantum neural networks. Train a layered QNN analytically on a classical computer with Black Box Variational Inference, then run the tuned circuit on real hardware, sidestepping noise during training.
A Linux machine image that curates the best open-source software for data scientists and for quantum computing and computational mathematics practitioners. Launch it and the major QC frameworks are already installed.
Circuit lab
A three-qubit state-vector simulator running in this page. Click a slot to cycle through gates. A ● control in the same column turns every other gate there into a controlled gate, the multi-controlled style Qubiter compiles down to CNOTs.
Cycle: empty → H → X → Z → T → ● control. Time runs left to right.
Intellectual property
US 10,601,907 B2 describes a platform that splits a heavy workload into subtasks, farms them out to a swarm of ordinary web devices running GPU-accelerated WebGL, and reassembles the answer, with a blockchain ledger recording who computed what.
The server receives a workload request and cuts it into subtasks.
Phones, tablets, consoles, laptops and PCs compute in WebGL-enabled browsers.
Digital signatures, encryption, shared secrets, and smart chargers as hardware dongles.
Smart-contract blockchains keep an immutable audit of every executed task.
Microservices spawn requestor and swarm instances as demand rises.
Open source
Seventeen public repositories. Stars and forks for the ten most visible, as of September 2026.
Ecosystem
In 2021 The Quantum Insider mapped Toronto's quantum scene, much of it grown through the Creative Destruction Lab. Select a company to see its focus.
Sources
Databases disagree on the founding date: Tracxn lists 2015, Crunchbase lists November 2018, and the founders' own blog announces the company in September 2016. This page follows the founders' account.