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The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Sebastian Hassinger
Your host, Sebastian Hassinger, interviews brilliant research scientists, software developers, engineers and others actively exploring the possibilities of our new quantum era. We will cover topics in quantum computing, networking and sensing, focusing on hardware, algorithms and general theory. The show aims for accessibility - Sebastian is not a physicist - and we'll try to provide context for the terminology and glimpses at the fascinating history of this new field as it evolves in real time.
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- 2 days ago41 min
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 IntoWhy 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 researchThe 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 todayHow 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-toolingWhy 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 vendorsThe 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 needsWhat 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 lateWhy 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 movingResources & LinksGuest & OrganizationKate Waimey Timmerman — Chicago Quantum Exchange ProfileChicago Quantum Exchange — About — Overview of CQE's 2026 milestones, member institutions, and program portfolioThe Bloch Quantum Tech Hub ($55M EDA Award)UChicago News — CQE-led Bloch Quantum Tech Hub raises $55 million — Primary announcement of the July 2026 EDA awardQuantum Computing Report — Bloch Quantum Tech Hub Secures $55M — Technical analysis of the award and its manufacturing focusThe Quantum Insider — Bloch Raises $55M — Coverage including corporate commitments from IBM, IonQ, and InfleqtionThe Quantum Insider — Bloch Advances in EDA Competition — Background on the tri-state coalition structure across Illinois, Wisconsin, and IndianaWorkforce & Economic DevelopmentHPCwire — CQE Releases Unified Strategy to Scale Midwest Quantum Workforce — Coverage of the NSF-backed "Advancing Together" report referenced in the conversationArgonne National Laboratory — Quantum Prairie Economic Symposium — Includes BCG's regional workforce and economic impact projectionsIllinois Economic Development Corporation — Kate Timmerman — Context on CQE's growth and Illinois' quantum strategyPrograms & Tools Mentioned<a href="https://pme.uchicago.edu/news/quantum-enabling-startup-founde
- 1 weeks ago43 min
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 LearnWhy 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 itWhat "public goods" and "digital commons" actually look like in quantum — from benchmarking to compilation to error mitigation toolingHow 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 warningHow Unitary Foundation is experimenting with continuous compensation for contributors via bounty programs and pilots with Merit SystemsWhy corporate members like NVIDIA and IBM invest in a vendor-neutral nonprofit — and how governance keeps the "open" in open sourceWhat a healthy pipeline from first-time contributor to sustained open-source maintainer would look like, and why Ben wants an endowment behind itWhy Ben resists top-down definitions of the "open substrate" and prefers to let the community surface bottlenecksThe long-term vision: a "Linux moment" for quantum, and what it would take to install it before proprietary stacks lock inResources & LinksGuest & OrganizationAnnouncing Our New CEO — Unitary Foundation — The February 2026 announcement of Ben as UF's first CEO, with the full arc from Chief of Staff to COO to CEO.Ben Castanon on LinkedIn — Ben's professional history, including his Pioneer Works tenure and current UF work.Unitary Foundation — The organization's homepage and hub for grants, tools, membership, and community.Papers & Reports2025 Quantum Open Source Software Survey Results — The fourth annual QOSS survey, including the finding that ~40% of full-time contributors are unpaid.The Young and the Relentless — The Quantum Insider — Independent coverage of the QOSS survey's demographic findings.Celebrating Over 100 Microgrants — Impact report: 420+ citing papers, 3 startups, 1 nonprofit, and 400+ OSS contributors funded.Tools & ProgramsUnitary 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.EcosystemNVIDIA Joins Unitary Foundation as Core Member — The May 2026 announcement referenced in the conversation.Announcing Unitary Foundation (Rebrand) — Context on why "Unitary Fund" became "Unitary Foundation."Key Quotes & InsightsOn 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 cont
- 2 weeks ago49 min
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 LearnWhy a conventional camera can lose roughly 95% of the information a photon carries, and what quantum Fisher information theory says about recovering itHow Diffraqtion's device processes light directly in the photonic domain before converting it to electronic information — and why that matters for shot noiseThe honest answer to "is this really quantum?" — including where the technology sits between quantum information theory, photonics, and analog computingWhy a 6U CubeSat with a 10-centimeter aperture can plausibly compete with school-bus-sized observation satellites for specific tasksHow a "diffractive neural network" runs image classification at the speed of light with negligible power consumptionThe 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 itWhat quantum sensing needs from policy, capital, and PR to escape the shadow of quantum computingResources & LinksGuest & CompanyDiffraqtion — 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 & ReportsQuantum Index Report 2025 (arXiv) — The preprint of the MIT QIR, co-authored by Galatsanos. Essential reading for anyone trying to see the quantum landscape as a whole.MIT Sloan — New MIT Report Captures State of Quantum Computing — Background on the QIR and Galatsanos's research role at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.MIT Sloan — Quantum Report Charts Growing Business Interest — Further QIR findings on the growth in corporate quantum mentions.Press & CoverageDiffraqtion Pre-Seed Announcement (PR Newswire) — Official release covering the $4.2M raise, DARPA contract, and founding team.Breaking Defense — DARPA Backs Diffraqtion — The most in-depth interview on the DARPA SBIR contract and programmable light plates.The Quantum Insider — Diffraqtion $4.2M Raise — Investor context including quotes from Chad Rigetti; technical claims on resolution and processing.Payload Space — Diffraqtion Emerges from Stealth — Commercial framing around the 6U CubeSat cost model.Defense One — Quantum Cameras Could Remake Space-Based Intelligence — Policy and defense framing.Sponsor</stro
- 3 weeks ago1h 19m
Episode 100: Live at Barnes & 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 LearnWhy 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 fieldHow 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 workWhat 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 lineWhat 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 developmentWhat 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 hubWhy 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 upsideWhat 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 physicsWhat 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 computingWhy 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 yetWhere 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 watchWhy 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 raceWhat 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 & LinksGuest & Host LinksRobert W. Karr Jr. — Barnes & Thornburg Attorney Profile — Bob's firm bio covering his role as partner and QTI Group co-chairRobert W. Karr Jr. — LinkedIn — Recent activities including the Illinois–UK Quantum Partnerships Mission a
- Jun 29, 202638 min
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 IntoWhy 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 & LinksGuest & CompanyDaniel Faircloth Bio — Nullspace, Inc. — Background on Daniel's path from GTRI and IERUS to co-founding Nullspace.Nullspace, Inc. — Company homepage covering the Nullspace EM and Nullspace ES product suites.Inside Nullspace: Rethinking Electromagnetic Simulation with Dr. Daniel Faircloth — A longer-form interview on why Daniel rebuilt EM simulation from scratch.Product & Technical ResourcesNullspace ES — Electrostatic Simulation for Quantum Computing — Product page detailing the ion-trap-specific capabilities discussed in the episode.Nullspace ES 2025 R1 Tech Brief — The release notes behind the high-order basis functions and 5× memory reduction Daniel describes.Precision Ion Trap Modeling and Simulation for Quantum Applications — Webinar featuring Oxford Ionics' Curtis Volin demonstrating Nullspace ES on a surface-electrode trap.Papers & Background ReadingReliable Transport Through a Microfabricated X-Junction Surface-Electrode Ion Trap (NJP, 2013) — The GTRI paper Daniel co-authored, including the corner-turning ion transport work referenced in the episode.Daniel Faircloth — ResearchGate profile — Additional EM and ion trap publications from Daniel's GTRI/IERUS years.Company & Funding Context<a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nullspace-raises-2-5m-seed-round-to-enable-next-generation-simulation-soft
- Jun 22, 202642 min
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.SponsorThis 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 IntoHow a Chicago theater board led to one of the most unique qubit companies in the fieldWhy electrons-on-helium failed in the early 2000s and why circuit QED, dry fridges, and CMOS now make it viableThe physical picture: a thin superfluid helium film coating a CMOS chip, with electrons trapped a few nanometers above the surface by their own image chargeWhy 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 itThe "build a quantum computer in reverse" philosophy: starting from a million-qubit architecture and working back toward two-qubit gatesHow the "Wonder Lake" chip controls 2,432 future qubit sites today, and why that's an engineering milestone rather than a qubit countHonest framing of where EeroQ actually is: no two-qubit gate demonstrated yet, with a tape-out target of ~10,000 qubits by late 2028Why dipole-dipole gates come first and exchange gates come later, borrowing from the spin qubit playbookThe case that scaling — not qubit quality — has been the field's slowest-moving problem over the last decadeResources & LinksGuest & CompanyEeroQ — Company site for the only commercial electron-on-helium quantum hardware effort.EeroQ Publications — Peer-reviewed papers and preprints from the team.Building a Quantum Computer in Reverse (EeroQ Blog, July 2023) — Farina's own articulation of the scale-first design philosophy discussed in the episode.Key PapersKoolstra, Glen, Beysengulov et al., "Strong coupling of a microwave photon to an electron on helium," Nature Physics, June 2026 — First demonstration of strong coupling between a microwave photon and the quantized motional state of a single electron on helium, including observation of vacuum Rabi splitting — establishing the cavity-QED readout link at the heart of EeroQ's architecture. This result was under embargo when the episode was recorded.Castoria
- Jun 15, 202645 min
Quantum Drug Discovery and the Path to Advantage with Sabrina Maniscalco
Why This Episode MattersSabrina 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 SPONSORThis 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 IntoWhy a background in open quantum systems and non-Markovian noise turned out to be unusually well-suited to running algorithms on noisy near-term hardwareThe 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 qubitsHow quantum-boosted DMRG works — and why it gives you a built-in benchmark against the best classical method via the bond dimensionThe tradeoff Sabrina would and wouldn't make between more qubits and lower noise, and why neutral atoms' slower sampling rates matter for chemistryWhy even fault-tolerant algorithms like quantum phase estimation still depend on getting state initialization and measurement rightAlgorithmiq's two-product structure: the Digital Quantum Interface (hardware-agnostic infrastructure) and the life sciences application frameworkHow methods built for chemistry are now opening doors into optimization and GenAI — and why that direction emerged from the work, not from a strategy deckWhat the move from Helsinki to Milan signals about the European quantum ecosystem and Algorithmiq's commercial scale-upHow an active learning pipeline is already proposing novel drug variants for synthesis in Prof. Sherri McFarland's labResources & LinksGuest & CompanyAlgorithmiq — The company Sabrina co-founded with Guillermo García-Pérez, Matteo Rossi, and Boris Sokolov; quantum software for life sciences and chemistry.Sabrina Maniscalco — University of Helsinki Research Portal — Publication record covering open quantum systems, non-Markovian dynamics, and quantum information.Sabrina Maniscalco — AI for Good Bio — Consolidated bio covering academic roles and advisory positions, including IQOQI Austria and CERN's Quantum Technology Initiative.The Q4Bio WinAlgorithmiq Wins $2M Wellcome Leap Q4Bio Prize — Company announcement detailing the photodynamic therapy workflow.Wellcome Leap — Q4Bio Prize Announcement — Funder's perspective on finalists and criteria.IBM Qua
- Jun 8, 202646 min
Funding the Quantum Middle: Series A/B Capital with Kris Naudts and Zeynep Koruturk of Firgun Ventures
Why This Episode MattersFirgun 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.SponsorThis 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 IntoWhy Kris's ALS misdiagnosis became the conviction event that pulled him from media entrepreneurship into quantum investingHow Zeynep's decade at Goldman Sachs Tech Initiative shaped her pattern-matching for deep tech, and where that pattern-matching breaks down in quantumThe 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 isHow Firgun underwrites engineering and execution risk after the scientific risk is largely retiredWhy a quantum-specialist fund unlocks soft commitments from larger institutions that otherwise stay on the sidelinesThe role of Firgun's "scientific co-founder" Professor Mete Atatüre and the need for sub-specialist diligence across modalitiesHow Firgun thinks about portfolio construction across silicon-spin/photonic (Photonic Inc.), silicon CMOS (Quantum Motion), and other architectures without picking a qubit winnerWhy a truly global mandate is a feature, not a focus problem, given how concentrated quantum talent is in roughly a dozen ecosystemsHow sovereign capital, US equity-stake announcements, and geopolitical fragmentation are starting to reshape who can invest in whatWhy the binary "fault-tolerant or bust" framing of quantum investing misses the gradient of capability that drives near-term valueResources & LinksGuest & FirmFirgun 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 & ThesisFirgun Ventures Launches $250M VC Fund to Invest in Quantum — The Quantum Insider — Launch details, QIA anchor commitment, and founder backgrounds.Firgun Ventures Launches With $70M for Quantum Tech Innovation — TechFundingNews — Deeper breakdown of the LP roster and market rationale.Firgun Ventures: Scaling Quantum Beyond the Early Stages — Future of Computing — Extended interview with Kris and Zeyn
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About The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology
Your host, Sebastian Hassinger, interviews brilliant research scientists, software developers, engineers and others actively exploring the possibilities of our new quantum era. We will cover topics in quantum computing, networking and sensing, focusing on hardware, algorithms and general theory. The show aims for accessibility - Sebastian is not a physicist - and we'll try to provide context for the terminology and glimpses at the fascinating history of this new field as it evolves in real time.
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