Artificial neural networks are the heart of machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence. Historically, the simplest implementation of an artificial neuron traces back to the classical Rosenblatt’s “perceptron”, but its long term practical applications may be hindered by the fast scaling up of computational complexity, especially relevant for the training of multilayered perceptron networks. Here we introduce a quantum information-based algorithm implementing the quantum computer version of a binary-valued perceptron, which shows exponential advantage in storage resources over alternative realizations. We experimentally test a few qubits version of this model on an actual small-scale quantum processor, which gives answers consistent with the expected results. We show that this quantum model of a perceptron can be trained in a hybrid quantum-classical scheme employing a modified version of the perceptron update rule and used as an elementary nonlinear classifier of simple patterns, as a first step towards practical quantum neural networks efficiently implemented on near-term quantum processing hardware.