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April 29, 2025
QuEra Selected for Phase I of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative
Summary of "Quantum Computing: The Past, Present, and Future" | Jonathan Wurtz's Presentation at Pawsey
The latest stop on QuEra’s Quantum & Friends world‑tour webinar series focused on the German‑speaking market and brought together four complementary voices from across the emerging quantum‑technology stack. Yuval Boger, Chief Commercial Officer of QuEra, moderated a lively discussion with Marcus Buchberger (QMWare), Alexandra Beckstein— CEO of QAI Ventures, and Jan Trautmann (Head of Development, Kipu Quantum). Each speaker addressed a different layer of the value chain: scalable neutral‑atom hardware, cloud/HPC integration, start‑up acceleration and venture financing, and algorithm design tuned to near‑term devices. Together they offered a crisp snapshot of how fast the European ecosystem is aligning around tangible, commercially relevant use‑cases.
Boger opened with a concise primer on QuEra’s Boston‑based roadmap. Neutral‑atom arrays—operating at room temperature with reconfigurable, all‑to‑all connectivity—have moved from laboratory curiosity to real industrial contender. QuEra’s first machine, Aquila, has been live on AWS since November 2022, and the company is now shipping on‑premise systems. Notably, QuEra recently secured a US $230 million strategic round led by Google and SoftBank, underscoring confidence that error‑corrected, utility‑scale neutral‑atom processors are within a two‑to‑three‑year horizon.
Boger framed QuEra’s go‑to‑market around three customer archetypes: enterprises seeking competitive advantage, HPC centers looking to solve classically intractable problems, and governments aiming to seed high‑value tech clusters. The company’s offerings mirror those needs—turn‑key systems, collaborative research on error correction and novel algorithms, and an 18‑ to 24‑month “algorithm co‑design” sprint that walks clients from problem identification through full‑stack implementation.
Marcus Buchberger positioned QMWare as the “quantum hypervisor” that welds QPUs to classical exascale resources. The firm operates cloud‑native services from its own data centers in Vienna and Munich and is expanding to partner facilities across the EU. Its API abstracts away underlying qubit modalities so developers can orchestrate hybrid workflows transparently—whether the back‑end is an IonQ trapped‑ion device, an IQM superconducting chip, or QuEra’s neutral‑atom array.
Critically, QMWare collocates classical accelerators (GPUs, CPUs) in the same racks as QPUs to minimize latency for variational and reservoir‑computing workloads. The strategy dovetails with the European Commission’s recent push to build AI‑focused super‑computing centers; many of those sites already host quantum hardware, giving QMWare natural integration points.
Buchberger also teased ongoing research with Terra Quantum’s Ticu 42 platform to combine quantum neural‑network layers with classical deep‑learning stacks, and hinted at studies using QuEra’s analog mode for quantum reservoir computing—an area where early papers suggest performance gains on sparse clinical or industrial time‑series data.
If QMWare is the plumbing, Switzerland‑based QAI Ventures is the match‑maker. CEO Alexandra Beckstein described her firm’s dual identity: a seed‑to‑Series C venture fund and a global accelerator that convenes universities, corporates and hardware providers. Since 2022 QAI has invested in 20+ start‑ups spanning sensing, communications and computing, while running five‑month accelerator cohorts that embed founders alongside domain mentors such as ex‑IQM and ex‑Rigetti executives.
QAI's geographic footprint maps to quantum hot‑spots rather than funding incentives: Basel (HQ), Calgary (leveraging Canada’s talent influx and government support), newly opened offices in Japan to tap early‑adopter conglomerates, and exploratory programs in Singapore for finance‑specific use‑cases. Upcoming “World Series of Hackathons” events at CERN, Calgary and a third venue (TBA) aim to build developer talent pipelines.
Take‑away: For enterprises hesitant to hire an in‑house quantum team, partnering with an accelerator like QAI offers a low‑risk way to explore proofs‑of‑concept, gain talent visibility and co‑invest alongside specialists who can curate viable start‑ups.
Jan Trautmann closed the technical loop by drilling into algorithmic innovations designed for today’s noisy devices. Berlin‑based Kipu specializes in counter‑adiabatic techniques that cut circuit depth by 10‑ to 100‑fold, allowing realistic industrial problems to fit within current coherence budgets. In benchmark studies on higher‑order optimization instances, select models already rival CPLEX in speed or solution quality.
A highlight was Kipu’s collaboration with QuEra and Spanish operator MásMóvil: mapping 10 percent of the telecom’s backbone network—150 physical qubits after gadgetization—onto Aquila to evaluate redundancy placement via a Maximum Independent Set formulation. Early runs demonstrated that neutral‑atom connectivity can attack real‑world sub‑problems today and should scale to full‑network resilience analysis on the next‑gen device.
Kipu also echoed QuEra’s earlier work with Merck on quantum reservoir computing, showing that preprocessing a toxicity‑prediction dataset on Aquila boosted balanced accuracy over gradient‑boosted trees and random forests despite severe class imbalance. The message: hybrid quantum‑ML pipelines can yield measurable wins well before fully fault‑tolerant eras.
Finally, the acquisition of the PlanQK cloud platform lets Kipu expose its algorithm suite through simple APIs and connect automatically to preferred hardware back‑ends—QuEra included.
Across the hour, a pragmatic playbook emerged for organisations eyeing quantum adoption:
From a regional standpoint, Germany and its neighbours stand to gain disproportionately. Europe’s strict data‑sovereignty laws create demand for in‑region cloud offerings—QMWare’s “sovereign quantum cloud” pitch. The concentration of automotive, logistics and pharma HQs provides textbook combinatorial‑optimization and molecular‑simulation targets, while well‑funded university clusters in Munich, Jülich and Zurich supply steady talent. Add a neutral‑atom supplier scaling aggressively in Boston‑Cambridge (connected via the new NVIDIA Advanced Quantum Center) and the ingredients for cross‑Atlantic co‑development are in place.
Opinion: This webinar was less about blue‑sky physics and more about knitting together a commercial supply chain. The fact that a single session could cover venture funding, algorithm benchmarks, cloud deployment and a concrete telecom pilot speaks volumes about how quickly quantum is growing up. If your enterprise IT roadmap still lists quantum under “2028+ exploration,” consider compressing that timeline.
Boger closed by inviting attendees to QuEra’s 30 April Science with QuEra seminar on algorithmic fault tolerance—another indicator that the conversation is shifting from “can we build?” to “how do we optimize?” In parallel, expect fresh results on quantum reservoir computing, new European AI‑quantum data centers coming online, and more start‑ups graduating from accelerators armed with pilot‑ready vertical solutions.
The Germany edition of Quantum & Friends illustrated that no single company will deliver quantum advantage alone. Success will hinge on tight partnerships that span hardware physics, cloud engineering, venture finance and domain‑specific algorithmics. The good news: those partnerships are already forming—now it’s up to forward‑thinking enterprises to plug in.
Watch the full webinar here:
