• 44 minutes 21 seconds
    Silicon Spin Qubits and the IBM–HRL Acquisition with Thaddeus D. Ladd

    Thaddeus Ladd has spent seventeen years at HRL as the theoretical anchor of its silicon spin qubit program — co-authoring the 2023 Nature paper that demonstrated universal logic with encoded spin qubits, and contributing to the 2026 QPU paper that integrated qubits, a cryo-CMOS controller, and a new superconducting ribbon cable into a single digitally controlled system. He is not a commentator on this acquisition; he is one of the people whose work made it happen.

    The conversation is recorded eleven days after IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire HRL from Boeing and General Motors — a deal that has not yet closed. That timing makes this one of the few technically grounded, insider-adjacent conversations available about what IBM is actually buying, why the exchange-only spin qubit architecture is strategically distinctive, and what the combination of HRL's research culture with IBM's fabrication ambitions could produce. Listeners who follow quantum hardware, quantum computing strategy, or the evolution of industrial research labs will find this episode unusually substantive.

    What We Get Into

    • Why the 2026 QPU paper is a systems story, not just a fidelity story — the qubit chip, the cryo-CMOS controller operating at four Kelvin, and the new superconducting ribbon cable are all part of one integrated QPU, and that framing is central to understanding what IBM acquired.
    • What "exchange-only" actually means — why using only voltage-controlled exchange interactions (no microwaves, no local oscillators, no phase tracking during idle) is both a technical constraint and a significant engineering advantage for scaling.
    • Why the jump from six dots to fifty-four dots happened so fast — and what was happening in HRL's fabrication program that wasn't being published.
    • What EUV lithography has to do with spin qubit scaling — and why the connection between HRL's process and IBM's Anderon 300 mm quantum foundry is one of the clearest pieces of strategic logic in the acquisition announcement.
    • How HRL's cryo-CMOS work could benefit IBM's superconducting program — and why the control-and-interconnect bottleneck is a shared problem across modalities, not a spin-qubit-specific one.
    • The "chandelier" reframe — Thaddeus's argument that the cables, filters, and control electronics surrounding a superconducting qubit chip are not overhead; they are part of the QPU, and understanding that changes how you read the HRL acquisition.
    • Which modality Thaddeus thinks will reach commercially useful scale first — and why he still believes spin qubits are the long-term answer, using an analogy to vacuum tubes and silicon microprocessors that is worth hearing in full.
    • What the acquisition means for HRL as an institution — the context of lost program funding, the December 2025 Q2B meeting, and what it means for a defense-oriented industrial research lab to find a commercial path through IBM.

    Resources & Links

    Guest

    Papers & Articles

    Acquisition & IBM Strategy

    Tools & Platforms

    Organizations

    • <...
    17 August 2026, 4:26 pm
  • 44 minutes 25 seconds
    Quantum in the Big Four with Aaron Kemp

    Aaron Kemp sits at an unusual intersection. He holds a doctorate in cybersecurity, spent years in DoD classified environments running SCI and SAP facilities, and now leads KPMG's quantum research practice — where he's a co-author on a recent hybrid QML paper with Kipu Quantum and IBM. He's also the lead author of KPMG's Q-PREP framework, which pushes enterprises to treat post-quantum cryptography migration as an operational risk problem right now.

    If you've wondered how quantum actually lands inside a Fortune 200 boardroom — not the hype cycle version, but the "what do you actually tell the CFO" version — this episode maps that territory honestly. It's also useful listening if you're trying to understand the emerging talent gap, why the quiet in enterprise research publications may itself be a signal, and how a firm known for audit and advisory ends up doing multispectral analysis of chestnut trees on IBM quantum processors.

    What We Get Into

    • Why KPMG split quantum into distinct practices — PQC, sensing, optimization, and research — and what that structural choice signals about market timing
    • How a PBS documentary about the American chestnut tree led to a peer-reviewed quantum ML paper with Kipu Quantum and IBM
    • The honest case for a 3% accuracy gain over classical ResNet-50 baselines — and why Aaron treats it as a positive-sum signal rather than a victory lap
    • Why "what makes a good quantum problem" remains the most important question in the field, and how KPMG's client base shapes their answer
    • The seven-step Q-PREP framework for post-quantum cryptography readiness, and why step one — knowing what you actually have — is the hardest step
    • How data-centric thinking (not cryptography-centric thinking) reframes the PQC migration challenge
    • Why the quiet in enterprise research publications from major financial institutions may itself be a market signal
    • The talent bottleneck: ~16,500 quantum researchers on the planet against a coming wave of enterprise demand
    • How AI tooling is compressing quantum research timelines, and what that means for who can enter the field
    • Why the compute stack of the next decade will be heterogeneous — quantum, neuromorphic, thermodynamic, and mechanical computing all coexisting

    Resources & Links

    Guest & Organization

    Papers & Research

    PQC & Enterprise Frameworks

    Related Coverage & Commentary

    Key Quotes & Insights

    • On the 3% accuracy gain: "It's a positive game… we did a 12–15 week sprint, and to at least meet classical was our goal when we started. So when we actually did get three percent, it was repeatable. That was, to me, okay — there's something there."
    • On the real PQC problem: "We don't have a cryptographic problem. We have a data problem. None of these organizations know where their data flows."
    • On cybersecurity as a discipline: "Cybersecurity is probably the worst career field ever because perfect cybersecurity has no ROI — because nothing happens."
    • On enterprise timing: Insight: Aaron frames the quiet in financial services quantum research publications as a market signal — organizations may have stopped sharing because they're moving from research toward competitive advantage.
    • On the talent gap: "There's 16,500 quantum researchers on the planet… Fortune 200 will hire 16,000." A single tier of enterprise demand could exhaust the global talent pool.

    Related Episodes

    Stay in the Ecosystem

    • Subscribe on
    10 August 2026, 1:37 pm
  • 40 minutes 21 seconds
    Investing in the Quantum Frontier and the Road to Fault Tolerance with Barak Bussel

    Barak Bussel is one of the few people operating simultaneously at three levels of the quantum stack: deploying private capital into hardware and software companies through 7i Capital, chairing the strategic board of a major university quantum center, and helping stand up the physical infrastructure — a 700,000 square foot research park on the site of the former Westside Pavilion — meant to convene academia, industry, national labs, and startups in one place. He is also a physicist by training, which changes the kind of diligence questions he asks.

    We recorded this at the KPMG Tech and Innovation Symposium in Deer Valley, only weeks after the most consequential stretch of quantum news in years: Oratomic's $300M Series A (the largest first institutional round in quantum history, with 7i in the syndicate), a Google Quantum AI paper cutting Shor's algorithm resource estimates to around 500,000 physical qubits on superconducting hardware, and two June 2026 White House executive orders on quantum innovation and post-quantum cryptography. If you want to understand how a serious investor is actually pricing risk, timelines, and ecosystem-building in this moment, this is the conversation.

    What We Get Into

    • Why 7i backed Oratomic's aggressive "no intermediate product, straight to fault tolerance" strategy, and how Barak thinks about betting on teams versus theses in deep tech
    • How recent architecture and QLDPC error correction advances have compressed physical-to-logical qubit ratios, and what that means for near-term resource estimates for Shor's algorithm
    • Why a lesser-noticed April 2026 Google Quantum AI paper on quantum-assisted memory reduction for classical AI workloads may matter as much as the Shor's-focused headlines
    • What "patient capital" actually looks like when a connector problem eats two years of a portfolio company's roadmap
    • The Bell Labs template as a serious operating model for the UCLA Research Park: convening academia, industry, government, and startups in a single physical footprint
    • The historical resonance of UCLA sending the first ARPANET packet in 1969 and what that suggests about where quantum networking work should be anchored
    • How Kedma's error mitigation work with IBM's Heron II and RIKEN pushed a 51-qubit Ising model simulation to the edge of what's classically tractable
    • How Barak reads the June 2026 executive orders and the federal role — enabling infrastructure rather than picking winners — against the scale of Chinese government funding

    Resources & Links

    Guest & Organizations

    The Oratomic Round and Recent Breakthroughs

    Policy and Market Context

    UCLA Research Park and Regional Ecosystem

    Key Quotes & Insights

    • On patient capital in hardware: "You're producing a new chip… all of a sudden a year and a half has passed." Barak's example of a photonics company that spent two years solving a flex connector problem is a useful ground truth for anyone modeling quantum hardware timelines.
    • On the role of universities: Industry has scale — the ability to throw 500 engineers at a problem. Academia brings "the quiet depth to think very deeply about a problem over an extended period of time, two or three generations ahead."
    • On resource estimates: The gap between the original 20-million-qubit Shor's estimates and the recent Google Quantum AI paper suggesting ~500,000 physical qubits on superconducting hardware, plus Oratomic's neutral-atom approach at the ten-thousand-qubit scale, represents a genuine compression of the fault-tolerance horizon.
    • On the underappreciated Google paper: An April 8 paper on using quantum processors to reduce memory requirements for massive classical data sets is, in Barak's view, the first rigorous demonstration that quantum could bend the exponential curve of AI compute demand.
    • On government's role: "Typically in the U.S., government is not the best at picking the winners and losers in the marketplace. But it's great at enabling." The El Segund...
    3 August 2026, 10:20 pm
  • 41 minutes 39 seconds
    Building the U.S. Quantum Supply Chain with Kate Timmerman

    Kate Timmerman is the CEO of the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE), and she is arguably one of the most consequential ecosystem builders in quantum today. Under her leadership, the CQE has grown from three founding institutions in 2017 to a coalition of more than 50 industry and academic partners, and the region has secured designation as a top global quantum ecosystem through The Bloch Quantum U.S. EDA Tech Hub and an NSF Regional Innovation Engine development award.

    If you care about how emerging deep-tech industries actually get built — the unglamorous work of coordinating universities, startups, national labs, small manufacturers, workforce agencies, and federal policy — this episode is a masterclass. It's especially valuable for listeners trying to understand how quantum moves from bespoke, hand-built prototypes to real industrial-scale production, and what that transition means for jobs, national security, and U.S. competitiveness.

    What We Get Into

    • Why the CQE started 18 months before the National Quantum Initiative Act — and how that head start translated into winning multiple NQI research centers (SQMS, Q-NEXT, HQAN, and Q-NEXT-adjacent efforts)
    • What the $55M Bloch Tech Hub award actually funds in the next 12 months, and why the money targets manufacturing rather than more research
    • The severity of U.S. dependence on foreign and single-sourced quantum components — from nano-positioners to optics, photonics, and vacuum systems — and why that's slowing product delivery today
    • How small and mid-sized Midwest manufacturers (in states that already rank top-10 in U.S. manufacturing) can pivot into the quantum supply chain without full re-tooling
    • Why the BCG projection of ~$80B in regional economic impact and up to 191,000 quantum jobs by 2035 is more credible when you understand the full supply-chain vision, not just quantum computer vendors
    • The five pillars of the CQE's NSF-backed "Advancing Together" workforce strategy — awareness, preparation, mobility, employer leadership, and coordination — and why employers themselves often can't forecast their own hiring needs
    • What the Quantum Law Navigator™ is actually for, who uses it, and why first-time quantum founders often don't know what "export control" means until it's too late
    • Why Q2B is relocating its North America conference from Silicon Valley to Chicago in December 2026 — and what that signals about where the center of gravity is moving

    Resources & Links

    Guest & Organization

    The Bloch Quantum Tech Hub ($55M EDA Award)

    Workforce & Economic Development

    Programs & Tools Mentioned

    Key Quotes & Insights

    • On the 18-month head start: "When we hear an anecdote once or twice, we realize, if we're hearing it once or twice today, that means in two years the U.S. government's gonna hear about it." Kate's argument for why nimble ecosystem organizations have to move before the market signal is obvious.
    • On the supply chain problem: A significant portion of quantum components today are single-sourced and imported. That fragility, Kate argues, is quietly slowing every quantum company's ability to deliver products to customers — and it's the specific gap the Bloch award is designed to close.
    • On the manufacturing pivot: The Midwest already has top-10 manufacturing states, but those small and mid-sized shops "tend to be more mom and pop type shops, and they don't have R&D budgets" to speculatively re-tool for quantum. Federal implementation funding is the mechanism to bridge that gap.
    • On workforce reality: Employers "are so mission-focused on their tech development, they're not doing their own forecasts about what their jobs needs are gonna be in two and five years." Ecosystem organizations have to do that forecasting on behalf of the industry.
    • On what universities quietly subsidize: "The universities end up doing a lot of stuff for free… a lot of the preparing for the future that is not maybe of incredible priority at the moment, but that fundamental work, yes, on the research side, but also on the workforce development side, is incredibly important."

    Related Episodes

    27 July 2026, 4:20 pm
  • 43 minutes 47 seconds
    The Open Source Substrate for Quantum with Ben Castanon

    Ben Castanon became Unitary Foundation's first CEO in February 2026, after roughly four years with the organization as Chief of Staff and then COO. He came into quantum from an unusual direction — leadership roles at Pioneer Works, the Brooklyn arts-and-science center — and that background shows in how he thinks about scaffolding communities, funding public goods, and borrowing what works from other fields.

    This conversation matters now because Unitary Foundation sits at an inflection point. It has scaled from a microgrant program (the "Unitary Fund") into a foundation with a global developer community, corporate members including NVIDIA and IBM, an active compiler collection, a benchmarking initiative, and an annual open-source survey that increasingly serves as the field's ground truth. If you care about how quantum computing actually gets built — not just who wins the hardware race — this episode lays out the infrastructure argument clearly.

    What You'll Learn

    • Why Ben argues quantum open source falls into a structural funding gap between academia (chasing novel papers) and venture capital (chasing profitable businesses), and what philanthropy has to do about it
    • What "public goods" and "digital commons" actually look like in quantum — from benchmarking to compilation to error mitigation tooling
    • How to interpret the 2025 QOSS Survey finding that ~40% of full-time quantum OSS contributors are unpaid, and why Ben sees it as both an opportunity and a warning
    • How Unitary Foundation is experimenting with continuous compensation for contributors via bounty programs and pilots with Merit Systems
    • Why corporate members like NVIDIA and IBM invest in a vendor-neutral nonprofit — and how governance keeps the "open" in open source
    • What a healthy pipeline from first-time contributor to sustained open-source maintainer would look like, and why Ben wants an endowment behind it
    • Why Ben resists top-down definitions of the "open substrate" and prefers to let the community surface bottlenecks
    • The long-term vision: a "Linux moment" for quantum, and what it would take to install it before proprietary stacks lock in

    Resources & Links

    Guest & Organization

    Papers & Reports

    Tools & Programs

    • Unitary Compiler Collection (UCC) — The frontend-agnostic quantum compiler collection Ben references as a candidate for the open substrate.
    • UCC on GitHub — The active repo, supporting Qiskit, Cirq, PyTKET, and OpenQASM 2/3.
    • unitaryHACK 2026 — The sixth annual bug-bounty hackathon, one of UF's core mechanisms for compensating open-source contributors.

    Ecosystem

    Key Quotes & Insights

    • On the structural gap: There are "third spaces" where projects don't fit the incentives of either a startup or an academic lab — but where the whole ecosystem benefits. Benchmarking is the clearest example.
    • On unpaid contributors: "We've developed the field to a place where we're starting to hit up against the classic open source community issues." The volunteer surge is real — but so is the risk of losing those contributors to better-paying fields if UF can't convert enthusiasm into compensation.
    • On why big companies join: A functional field needs people to hire. Ben's argument to corporate members is partly workforce development — thousands of developers getting on-the-job training on neutral, community-owned tools.
    • On the substrate: Ben resists top-down definitions of what belongs in the open substrate. "It's much better to have all of the practitioners giving voice to what open tools they need."
    • On his long-term ambition: Build a philanthropic endowment that funds the microgrant pipeline in perpetuity — because "I don't see that as ever becoming a resource that is not of use."

    Related Episodes

    Stay in the Ecosystem

    ...
    20 July 2026, 1:51 pm
  • 49 minutes 24 seconds
    Quantum Cameras and Sub-Diffraction Imaging with Johannes Galatsanos

    Johannes Galatsanos occupies an unusual dual perch in the quantum ecosystem. As a co-author of the inaugural MIT Quantum Index Report, he's helped map the entire quantum landscape at altitude; as co-founder and CEO of Diffraqtion, he's staked his career on one of its most under-discussed corners: quantum imaging. The company spun out of Saikat Guha's lab at the University of Maryland after more than a decade of DARPA-funded research, emerged from stealth in January 2026 with $4.2M in pre-seed funding, and is now racing toward on-sky telescope demonstrations and a 2028 satellite launch.

    This episode is for listeners who want a technically honest look at where the "quantum" label is doing real work in a sensor versus where it's shading into sophisticated photonics and analog computing. If you care about how quantum technologies actually reach the world — through markets, contracts, and hardware that ships — this conversation gives you a specific, concrete example to think with.

    What You'll Learn

    • Why a conventional camera can lose roughly 95% of the information a photon carries, and what quantum Fisher information theory says about recovering it
    • How Diffraqtion's device processes light directly in the photonic domain before converting it to electronic information — and why that matters for shot noise
    • The honest answer to "is this really quantum?" — including where the technology sits between quantum information theory, photonics, and analog computing
    • Why a 6U CubeSat with a 10-centimeter aperture can plausibly compete with school-bus-sized observation satellites for specific tasks
    • How a "diffractive neural network" runs image classification at the speed of light with negligible power consumption
    • The difference between Diffraqtion's hard-coded Gen 1 camera and the reprogrammable Gen 2 that can swap algorithms in orbit (canopy detection over the Amazon, ship detection over the Atlantic)
    • Why the Habitable Worlds Observatory needs a coronagraph capability — and how you can build one by processing light rather than blocking it
    • What quantum sensing needs from policy, capital, and PR to escape the shadow of quantum computing

    Resources & Links

    Guest & Company

    • Diffraqtion — Company homepage; describes the technology, NASA/DARPA lineage, and the "quantum eye" framing referenced in the conversation.
    • Johannes Galatsanos on LinkedIn — Recent activity including SmallSat Europe, the NASA Space to Soil Challenge, and GQIG Summit talks on quantum imaging.

    Papers & Reports

    Press & Coverage

    Sponsor

    Key Quotes & Insights

    • On quantum information loss: "When you do a direct image… you lose something like 95% of information from that photon. So you leave 95% on the table, and the question was: how do you extract that back?"
    • On what "quantum" really means here: Galatsanos is refreshingly candid — the device uses quantum Fisher information theory to set the physical limit and configure the hardware, but the runtime processing is closer to analog photonic computing than to gate-based quantum computing. He describes it as sitting between "quantum 1.0" and quantum sensing.
    • On the frog's-eye analogy: Retinal ganglion cells can process shapes and trajectories faster than the brain — which is why you can catch a baseball or a falling fork before you consciously see it. Diffraqtion is trying to give satellites and robots the same kind of reflex.
    • On the JPEG as a historical artifact: "JPEG was a little bit of a logical step… but now the thought is, forget about it — you don't even need that. The light itself already will tell you." The machine, unlike a human operator, doesn't need an image.
    • On why quantum sensing lags in the discourse: Insight — quantum computing benefits from a single unifying narrative that every vendor can pull on. Quantum sensing has to invent its own story from scratch for each modality, which is a structural PR disadvantage more than a technical one.

    Related Episodes

    13 July 2026, 1:00 pm
  • 1 hour 19 minutes
    Episode 100: Live at Barnes &amp; Thornburg — Reflections on the First 100 Episodes

    This is the 100th episode of The New Quantum Era, and it arrives at a moment of convergence: the book is out, the Helgoland centennial documentary is in production, regional quantum ecosystems are scaling from ambition to construction, and the field is entering the transition from heroic-era qubit demos to the hard systems engineering that will determine whether quantum computing becomes a real industry. Bob Karr — who sits at the intersection of law, policy, and the quantum ecosystem as the person behind the Quantum Law Navigator and a convener across the Chicago quantum community — is the right person to conduct this retrospective, and Barnes & Thornburg, at the center of arguably the most sophisticated quantum ecosystem in the world, is the right place to do it.

    The conversation is structured as a celebration and an examination: what has Sebastian actually learned by sitting with nearly 100 physicists, engineers, founders, and policymakers? How has the field changed since that first visit to TJ Watson in 2017? What do regional hubs like the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park and Quebec's DistriQ tell us about what it takes to move from science to industry? And what does the next era demand — not just from researchers and companies, but from everyone?

    ---

    What You'll Learn

    • Why the Helgoland documentary matters: in June 2025, Sebastian and his wife traveled to the island where Heisenberg's 1925 insight gave birth to quantum mechanics, producing a documentary at a Yale–Max Planck centennial conference attended by multiple Nobel laureates — and what that experience distilled about the state of the field
    • How Sebastian's journey into quantum began: arriving at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in 2017 to help with Qiskit's open source strategy, encountering the 53-qubit milestone, and recognizing the earliest stages of an emerging technology that would become his life's work
    • What the "Heroic Age of Qubits" was — and why it ended: the period of genius PIs racing to prove quantum advantage, culminating in Google's 2019 random circuit sampling claim, and why that finish line turned out to be a starting line
    • What Harley Johnson and the IQMP reveal about ecosystem-building: why the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park is the world's leading example of building a quantum ecosystem, and what it takes to bridge deep science and economic development
    • What Quebec's DistriQ teaches about sustainability: the 90% public / 10% private funding model designed to flip over ten years, and why that benchmark matters for every regional hub
    • Why Alejandra Castillo's economic development lens changed the picture: how quantum's impact extends far beyond qubits into advanced manufacturing, supply chain, and the communities that get to participate in the upside
    • What Nadya Mason's leadership model means for the field: the dean of UChicago's Pritzker School who wasn't a "math person" and sees leadership as service — and why the field needs every kind of creative mind, not just PhDs in physics
    • What John Martinis's arc from the 1986 Josephson junction paper through the Nobel Prize to CoLab reveals: the transition from heroic-era physicist to systems thinker pursuing open architecture and consortium-based quantum computing
    • Why the Monte Carlo algorithm is the key analogy for quantum's future: the technique that took 30 years to find its commercial application as a reminder that the most important uses of quantum computers haven't been imagined yet
    • Where fault tolerance actually stands: why it's an emergent property of the whole system — not a single breakthrough — and why the classical-quantum feedback loop for mid-circuit measurement and syndrome correction is the thing to watch
    • Why multiple qubit modalities will coexist: the case for neutral atoms in the near term, superconducting and spin qubits in the long term, and photonics as a dark horse — and why this isn't a winner-take-all race
    • What Build Quantum Partners is building: a new venture to reduce friction for quantum companies entering the U.S. market, partner with regional ecosystems, and ultimately develop the quantum equivalent of biotech hub infrastructure

    ---

    Resources & Links

    Guest & Host Links

    The Book & Documentary

    • The New Quantum Era by Sebastian Hassinger — Released May 2026; the companion book tracing the people, science, and engineering behind quantum technology's emergence
    • Helgoland Documentary — In production; shot over five days at the Yale–Max Planck centennial conference on the island where Heisenberg formulated matrix mechanics in 1925

    Episodes & Guests Referenced

    Key Institutions & Ecosystem

    6 July 2026, 12:11 pm
  • 38 minutes 42 seconds
    Quantum EDA for Ion Trap Design with Daniel Faircloth

    Daniel Faircloth, PhD is an unusual figure in the quantum ecosystem: a computational electromagnetics engineer who actually helped build trapped-ion hardware before pivoting to the software stack the field was missing. He's a co-author on the 2013 New Journal of Physics paper that demonstrated reliable ion transport through a microfabricated X-junction surface-electrode trap at Georgia Tech Research Institute, and he spent the years afterward inside a defense contractor, IERUS Technologies, building the electromagnetic simulation engine that has now spun out as Nullspace.

    If you've been following the trapped-ion race — Quantinuum, IonQ, Oxford Ionics, AQT, and the academic groups feeding them — this episode fills in a layer of the story that rarely gets airtime. As the field moves from clever physics demonstrations toward genuinely scaled architectures, the design tools, the file formats, and the iteration loops start to matter as much as the qubits themselves. Listeners interested in quantum engineering, the analog of EDA in semiconductors, or how dual-use defense R&D translates into commercial quantum infrastructure will find a lot to chew on.

    What We Get Into

    • Why the standard "gapless approximation" for ion trap modeling — treating electrodes as polygons on an infinite metal sheet — breaks down well before you're ready to fabricate.
    • How Faircloth's graduate-school question ("can better tools turn a good engineer into a super engineer?") became the design philosophy behind Nullspace ES.
    • What turning an X-junction corner actually requires: two-stage optimization across trap geometry and control voltages, so the ion doesn't get heated out of the trap.
    • Why general-purpose electrostatic solvers struggle with ion trap problems that demand nanometer ion-height precision and millivolt-level shuttling voltage accuracy.
    • The technical leap in Nullspace ES 2025 R1: pairing high-order basis functions with a compression solver to cut memory usage roughly 5× while preserving accuracy.
    • The awkward commercial reality of selling neutral simulation infrastructure to companies that are direct competitors with each other.
    • The "build vs. buy" tension for hardware startups deciding whether to roll their own solver in Python or adopt a purpose-built commercial tool.
    • How the dual-use defense / commercial-quantum positioning shapes Nullspace's roadmap — and where lessons flow in both directions.
    • Where the roadmap might lead: multi-physics, tightly integrated workflows that eliminate the CAD-cleanup and file-format-exchange tax engineers pay today.

    Resources & Links

    Guest & Company

    Product & Technical Resources

    Papers & Background Reading

    Company & Funding Context

    Key Quotes & Insights

    • On the original product question (paraphrase): If you give powerful EM and optimization tools to a well-trained engineer, can you effectively turn them into a "super engineer" and unlock the kind of creativity that textbook parameterizations can't reach? That question became the through-line from Daniel's graduate work to Nullspace.
    • On why existing tools fall short (paraphrase): The community was trying to shoehorn ion trap design into solvers that were never built for it — gapless approximations, weak optimizers, and accuracy levels that simply don't hold up when you need nanometer ion heights and millivolt shuttling voltages.
    • On corner-turning in an X-junction (Daniel, lightly edited): "If you think of an ion trap as a fancy train track system, the ions are being shuttled around — you need to be able to turn left and turn right as you grow and scale. How do you get the ion to turn but not get heated in that process and lose the ion?"
    • On serving competing customers (paraphrase): A rising tide floats all boats. The better the underlying simulation tools, the more sophisticated the architectures every team can attempt — and the more chances the field has of someone breaking through.
    • On the long-term vision (Daniel): "Being able to provide all of that in an appropriate fidelity, one-stop shop for the designers. I don't want them to have to go to a bunch of different tools and try to kind of piece together dealing with file format exchange issues."

    Related Episodes

    29 June 2026, 1:05 pm
  • 41 minutes 46 seconds
    Electrons on Superfluid Helium with Nick Farina

    EeroQ is unusual in two ways. It's the only company in the world commercializing electrons-on-helium qubits, a modality first proposed by Platzman and Dykman in Science in 1999. And it was founded by Nick Farina — a software entrepreneur, not a physicist — who got pulled into the field through a Chicago theater board where he met his future co-founder, then-PhD student Johannes Pollanen.

    This conversation matters now because EeroQ has had an unusually productive twelve months: a Physical Review X paper demonstrating single-electron control above 1 Kelvin, a January 2026 result on controlling up to a million electrons with fewer than 50 control lines, and — published in Nature Physics on June 15, 2026 — the first demonstration of strong coupling between a microwave photon and a single electron on helium, the cavity-QED readout-and-control link the platform depends on. If you're trying to understand which "second-tier" modalities deserve serious attention — and how a small, capital-light team in Chicago is thinking about scale-first hardware design — this is a useful listen.

    Sponsor

    This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power.

    Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com.

    Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for.

    What We Get Into

    • How a Chicago theater board led to one of the most unique qubit companies in the field
    • Why electrons-on-helium failed in the early 2000s and why circuit QED, dry fridges, and CMOS now make it viable
    • The physical picture: a thin superfluid helium film coating a CMOS chip, with electrons trapped a few nanometers above the surface by their own image charge
    • Why EeroQ pivoted from motional states to spin qubits after Steve Lyon (Princeton) joined as CTO — and the predicted 10+ second coherence times that come with it
    • The "build a quantum computer in reverse" philosophy: starting from a million-qubit architecture and working back toward two-qubit gates
    • How the "Wonder Lake" chip controls 2,432 future qubit sites today, and why that's an engineering milestone rather than a qubit count
    • Honest framing of where EeroQ actually is: no two-qubit gate demonstrated yet, with a tape-out target of ~10,000 qubits by late 2028
    • Why dipole-dipole gates come first and exchange gates come later, borrowing from the spin qubit playbook
    • The case that scaling — not qubit quality — has been the field's slowest-moving problem over the last decade

    Resources & Links

    Guest & Company

    Key Papers

    Press & Context

    Ecosystem

    Key Quotes & Insights

    • On the contrarian thesis: "Scaling is actually the hardest part of building a quantum computer." Nick argues the field has made real strides on gate fidelity, error correction, and algorithms over the last decade — but not nearly enough on the path to hundreds of thousands or millions of qubits.
    • On building in reverse: Rather than starting from a two-qubit gate and "hoping and praying to find ways to scale," EeroQ started by asking what a million-qubit processor would have to look like — which forced the choice of CMOS as the only manufacturing technology humanity has ever used to build features at that scale.
    • On honest status: "We d...
    22 June 2026, 12:33 pm
  • 45 minutes 9 seconds
    Quantum Drug Discovery and the Path to Advantage with Sabrina Maniscalco

    Why This Episode Matters

    Sabrina Maniscalco is one of the few people in quantum who has lived the full arc: two decades of academic work on open quantum systems and non-Markovian noise at Palermo, Turku, Edinburgh, and Helsinki, followed by founding Algorithmiq with three of her former researchers after an early Qiskit Camp. That trajectory matters now because Algorithmiq just had a landmark stretch — sole winner of the $2M Wellcome Leap Q4Bio prize for a quantum-enabled cancer drug discovery workflow, an €18M Series B, a global HQ move to Milan, and its Tensor Network Error Mitigation (TEM) function landing in IBM's Qiskit Functions catalog.

    If you're trying to make sense of where quantum software actually creates value before fault tolerance arrives — and what a credible "trajectory to advantage" looks like when paired with real clients in life sciences — this is a grounded, technically specific conversation with someone building it.


    EPISODE SPONSOR

    This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power.

    Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com.

    Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for.


    What We Get Into

    • Why a background in open quantum systems and non-Markovian noise turned out to be unusually well-suited to running algorithms on noisy near-term hardware
    • The actual science behind the Q4Bio winning workflow: simulating excited-state dynamics of a photosensitizer drug already in Phase II clinical trials, on up to 100 qubits
    • How quantum-boosted DMRG works — and why it gives you a built-in benchmark against the best classical method via the bond dimension
    • The tradeoff Sabrina would and wouldn't make between more qubits and lower noise, and why neutral atoms' slower sampling rates matter for chemistry
    • Why even fault-tolerant algorithms like quantum phase estimation still depend on getting state initialization and measurement right
    • Algorithmiq's two-product structure: the Digital Quantum Interface (hardware-agnostic infrastructure) and the life sciences application framework
    • How methods built for chemistry are now opening doors into optimization and GenAI — and why that direction emerged from the work, not from a strategy deck
    • What the move from Helsinki to Milan signals about the European quantum ecosystem and Algorithmiq's commercial scale-up
    • How an active learning pipeline is already proposing novel drug variants for synthesis in Prof. Sherri McFarland's lab

    Resources & Links

    Guest & Company

    The Q4Bio Win

    Funding & HQ Move

    Quantum Advantage & Tooling

    Key Quotes & Insights

    • On the foundation of the company's approach: "We learned very early what we thought were the bottlenecks of quantum computers — what you really need to worry about if you want to implement computation at scale." A direct line from Qiskit Camp Vermont to Algorithmiq's product strategy.
    • On Q4Bio, in Sabrina's words: "This molecule is already in Phase II clinical trial. So it's not hydrogen. It's a real molecule." A useful counter to the common critique that quantum chemistry demos still live in toy-model land.
    • On quantum-boosted DMRG (insight): In the worst case, the method matches the best classical technique; in the better case, it outperforms it — and the bond dimension tells you which regime you're in. Built-in benchmarking against the classical baseline.
    • On the hardware tradeoff: Asked whether she'd prefer 100 higher-fidelity qubits or 200 noisier ones, Sabrina's answer is "it depends" — and the explanation about why neutral atoms' lower sampling rates limit chemistry use cases is one of the more concrete things you'll hear on platform tradeoffs.
    • On strategy (insight): New verticals at Algorithmiq are ...
    15 June 2026, 2:03 pm
  • 46 minutes 2 seconds
    Funding the Quantum Middle: Series A/B Capital with Kris Naudts and Zeynep Koruturk of Firgun Ventures

    Why This Episode Matters

    Firgun Ventures launched in late 2025 with a $70M first close anchored by the Qatar Investment Authority and a mandate that doesn't exist anywhere else in the market: lead Series A and B rounds in quantum scale-ups globally. Kris Naudts is a neuroscientist and former Culture Trip founder whose path to quantum runs through a near-fatal medical misdiagnosis. Zeynep Koruturk spent over a decade building the Goldman Sachs Tech Initiative and meeting more than a thousand founders. Both were early angels in what became Quantinuum.

    If you're trying to understand how quantum companies actually get financed between the lab and the IPO window — or why a specialist fund needed to exist at all — this conversation is one of the clearest views available. It's also a useful frame for founders thinking about what an informed institutional investor actually does in a round.


    Sponsor

    This episode is brought to you by Outshift, Cisco's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power.

    Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com.

    Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for.


    What We Get Into

    • Why Kris's ALS misdiagnosis became the conviction event that pulled him from media entrepreneurship into quantum investing
    • How Zeynep's decade at Goldman Sachs Tech Initiative shaped her pattern-matching for deep tech, and where that pattern-matching breaks down in quantum
    • The structural reason Series A/B is the real bottleneck in quantum financing — and why precede and seed capital is no longer the gap people assume it is
    • How Firgun underwrites engineering and execution risk after the scientific risk is largely retired
    • Why a quantum-specialist fund unlocks soft commitments from larger institutions that otherwise stay on the sidelines
    • The role of Firgun's "scientific co-founder" Professor Mete Atatüre and the need for sub-specialist diligence across modalities
    • How Firgun thinks about portfolio construction across silicon-spin/photonic (Photonic Inc.), silicon CMOS (Quantum Motion), and other architectures without picking a qubit winner
    • Why a truly global mandate is a feature, not a focus problem, given how concentrated quantum talent is in roughly a dozen ecosystems
    • How sovereign capital, US equity-stake announcements, and geopolitical fragmentation are starting to reshape who can invest in what
    • Why the binary "fault-tolerant or bust" framing of quantum investing misses the gradient of capability that drives near-term value

    Resources & Links

    Guest & Firm

    • Firgun Ventures — The fund's homepage, with the team and "Time to Talk Quantum" podcast featuring the founders' own framing of the market.
    • Firgun Ventures on Crunchbase — Confirms London HQ, global mandate, and Series A/B focus.

    Fund Launch & Thesis

    Portfolio Companies Mentioned

    Key Quotes & Insights

    • Kris on the conviction event: "If you're expecting to die and then you're told you're going to live, you have to rethink it yet again… You can go in the direction of enjoy every day, or you can go in the direction of let's try to do something meaningful with whatever time I have left."
    • Zeynep on the real bottleneck: Pre-seed and seed capital in quantum is no longer the gap — the A and B rounds are. Roughly 40% of companies in the space need that bridge to unlock larger institutional capital, and almost no one is set up to lead it.
    • Kris on diligence limits: No one person can underwrite the full quantum stack. Firgun pairs a "scientific co-founder" with sub-specialists for each modality, because in quantum "no propositions sound stupid" — and that's exactly the problem.
    • Zeynep on the asymmetric bet: Quantum is one of the few areas where geopolitical reality creates a floor under the downside. The West can't afford to lose, which means funding will be there long enough for the right companies to mature.
    • Kris on willing the timeline: "You cannot will it into being. The space will evolve at the pace it is set to evolve with the capital and the talent in it." A useful corrective for anyone pitching a five-year cure-for-Parkinson's roadmap.

    Related Episodes

    8 June 2026, 12:22 pm
  • More Episodes? Get the App