2024 Chicago Quantum Summit — Noel Goddard
- Hello. It's very exciting to be here today. Thank you for the honor of being able to open up this year's Chicago Quantum Summit. My name is Noel Goddard, I am the CEO of Qunnect, we are a company out of Brooklyn, New York.
New York is not one of the ecosystems which was named earlier, because it's fledgling at best. But we ended up there because we were a spin out of Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Lab, so it is akin to many of the startups that you're seeing here that are a combination of university and national lab efforts to be able to develop new technologies. So I'm going to talk today about what Qunnect does, but I have a foreword, which talks a little bit to the students in the room and also about my personal journey, so that you can understand sort of options in quantum technologies and how people get into this field and some of my opinions about where things are going after we've sort of evolved as our own company over the past few years. So I started off with a great interest in interdisciplinary sciences. I actually started in engineering school and then went over to the chemical physics program at Polytechnic University, which is now the NYU Engineering School.
And I was very fortunate to do an undergraduate research opportunity with a laboratory that built all of their own stuff, they machined everything, they did all their own electronics. And they were doing very forward thinking optics in the field of levitated droplets. And while that seems like, who cares about this type of thing, of course it's a little corner of the physics world, which had a lot to do with cavity quantum electrodynamics.
And it was a great place to learn and certainly a great place to become self-sufficient as an experimentalist. And I think that's, I again, encourage undergraduates continuously to get involved in research labs because I think it's transformative in terms of their education. And that drove me to do another interdisciplinary degree program at Rockefeller University.
So shout out, because of course the Rockefellers not only sponsored Rockefeller University, but of course they are big philanthropists here, who are responsible for a lot of the University of Chicago's earlier days. And I was co-advised in a program that at that time was very revolutionary, now there are biophysics and interdisciplinary programs everywhere for graduate school. But Rockefeller's way of doing it was to say, if you've done your physics someplace and passed your qualifier exams, come here and do this joint degree program where we'll give you the biology side of things. And I was very fortunate to work with Albert Albert Libchaber, who had actually spent a number of years here at the University of Chicago and the James Franck Institute, doing a lot of fluid dynamics work before he decided to go to biophysics. And Joshua Lederberg, who won the Nobel Prize for his work in microbiology and molecular microbiology many years prior. And it truly was an interdisciplinary program.
And through that I had the opportunity to learn about information theory. I spent a lot of time thinking about the error tolerance of the genetic code, which would eventually be my thesis work. I have to say that at the time, of course, like many physicists, I completely trivialized how hard biology was, so I did the experimental side, it was a learning lesson, but I ended up also enjoying it so much that I stayed there. And then that propelled me to continue in biophysics and some of the sort of intersections of that with information sciences by becoming a junior fellow at Harvard University, which is a great historic fellowship program. You can basically work anywhere across the university, being centrally funded.
And I worked with two professors who basically are at the intersection of industry and biotech, George Church, which maybe a lot of you know, because he has a huge number of companies that he started by this point. And Wally Gilbert, who was his mentor, also the president of the Society of Fellows and famous for being one of the founders of Biogen. That was a great experience for thinking about how does technology come out of the lab and actually live in startup companies and how that entire process works. So I was lucky to meet good mentors all along the way and to continue doing my interdisciplinary world. But I did decide to go back to academia.
In fact, when I was at Harvard, I really started thinking a lot about this idea of how important undergraduate research is. And I also am a big believer in the fact that we have to reinvest in our public systems. I think that you can just tell from the amount of funding that goes to tier one universities versus state institutions where the imbalance is.
And of course there are a lot of students who are in those systems because that is the opportunity at hand and they deserve great education. So I went to the City University of New York to build their biophysics program and I was a professor there for a number of years. It lived within the physics department, that's one of their stronger life science campuses. So we doubled the number of majors in the department literally in the first year, because of students' interest also in this interdisciplinary stuff. But I was restless, it was very difficult to get funding at...
Well, it was a city school, not even a state school, so these are not considered research institutions, so it's obviously hard to see the funding and realize the funding that comes down the pipeline. So I then decided to jump out and try my hand at being an entrepreneur. And I can tell everyone here, particularly the students who are in the room, if you're going to do this, you need to know where your salary's coming from, it's like the most important thing, right? So I decided that I would go to one of the incubators that was sitting at that time out in Long Island for Stony Brook University to work on a diagnostic idea that I had.
But in the meantime, I needed to make enough money to be able to support my startup habit. So I started working for a homework software company, it's not very glorious job, but it turns out that we need that too. As a content developer, I was doing tutoring and eventually I ended up even doing operations at one of the biotech accelerators that were in the city. But through that, I not only supported my own company, but then ended up working as the director of basically a drug delivery system research division for a therapeutics company in the city.
That was very educational in a completely different way. Neither my company nor that company ended up being success stories. But I think one of the things that you'll see as your ecosystem grows here in Chicago is that having a pool of serial entrepreneurs is a very important anchor to being able to continue to have success in growing industries. Lots of companies do not survive at first tries, right? You see this in the Boston ecosystem today, who is arguably one of the strongest biotech ecosystems in the United States. So I encourage you to not be sort of downtrodden about the fact that sometimes startups don't go to their final point of being a success story. The fact that you've educated the entrepreneurs in that exercise means that next time around, they'll do even better.
And then of course, I was then picked up by the state of New York who very much wanted to start supporting companies that were trying to build stuff. So New York has always done very well at funding startup companies that were in the software space, but they had done very poorly at doing deep tech and biotech. So the state put together an economic development fund to be able to be first money in on things that had heavy IP, which of course, quantum is one of those things.
I met Qunnect, which was then spinning out of Stony Brook University. And that's history now, I joined them in 2020. And the company itself had been started by two students and a professor.
The professor's first PhD student was in fact the founder of Qunnect, so it's very, very early in Qunnect time. And that all started just at the end of 217, beginning of 218, and they applied to the NSF I-Corps program in order to try to do customer discovery and to learn what their technology could do in the larger ecosystem. I would join them after we invested in the company at the beginning of 2020, which was just in time for the pandemic, not the greatest timing, but it gave us some time to actually think about how the company was going to retool to do something that would be a compelling story for both venture capital and for industry. And the reason that I say that is that we started as a quantum memory company, that was the technology that spun out of the university. And the value prop at the time was that we do everything at room temperature. Room temperature has some benefit if you're going to try to put technologies out in field deployments.
So we had this idea that it was gonna be very valuable to quantum networking, but the problem is, you had nothing to plug it in to. And every VC that I talked to at the time, many of which I had known from the community I was in for the startup in seed investing, they're like, "That's great Noel, what are you gonna plug it in to? Where's the drop-in solution?" So we retooled and said, okay, we're going to actually propose to build a product suite and that product suite will be a drop-in solution if you have fiber to be able to distribute entanglement on standard telecom fiber with high fidelity. And some of the instruments will be quantum and some of the other instruments will be sort of quantum support instruments. And that evolved into our idea of the first initial six instruments that we have there as icons, because it was way too difficult to show them any other way in the early days when we're trying to educate people. And in the background we had a DOE award, literally one phase two award carried us through the pandemic where we had enough salaries for the core team to survive and to pay the university for the IP, et cetera. And a year later, we would build basically the world's first commercial quantum memory, it's still the only commercial quantum memory out there that's sold five of them so far.
So we're very proud of that. It is largely a research tool, so that is the disclaimer in this, people aren't using them right and left for its intended purpose yet. There's a second generation coming soon.
But in the process we also developed the rest of that product suite, and that's something that I'll tell you about in the remainder of the talk. But as a company, we needed to continue to push forward. So we needed to find the right type of investors to be able to support this sort of long range mission and journey. And we were very fortunate to run into Airbus Ventures. Again, this is educational for the students there. I met them two years before we would be talking about a term sheet.
And they followed us for that time, I kept them continuously abreast of what we were doing. And look, it's hard, there's a lot of risk in this industry, we had both scientific risk, engineering risk, and then of course the business risk on the other side. And I think as a community, we have to acknowledge the fact that it's very difficult to build innovation and also build the market at the same time.
And Airbus Ventures has been a supporter to a lot of frontier tech, they also invest a lot of aerospace, so again, we were very fortunate that they had led our round. And with the proceeds of that, we would end up building this network in New York that David mentioned earlier. Our idea at the time was it's great to build instruments, but if you can't show that they work on something real, then it's not the business use case, right? So that's where we went with that.
Later we would end up also making friends in the Netherlands, which is one of the strongest communities for quantum communication across the globe, so we have a small presence there as well. And as of July, we're very proud to announce that all of those instruments that we proposed to build when they were just icons right now sit in a rack and we sold our first ones to New York University and we have interest from industry in buying some of the others. So the quantum memory itself, I just showed this slide because I think it's important for, again, everyone here who's thinking about being an entrepreneur, it's never the first thing you build that ends up being the product, right? We went through a lot of iterations of this.
Our CSO, founder, Mehdi Namazi, is there in the first picture. He's literally standing over an optics bench, which is in a Lucite case, that's the first portable quantum memory that got shipped to Sweden. Eventually his co-founder would build the first rack version that you see there is a six U monstrosity with two layers in it. Qunnect's first version would be wall mount, I don't know why they decided that, but it's another one of those...
Form factor matters, right? And then eventually we got to the first ones that we sold to Brookhaven National Lab and the the two U version that's here. But it hasn't stopped. And the table that you see down there, the optics table that's cluttered with all of those different elements, is basically our second generation memory and it will end up being shoved into a box, but it gives you some appreciation for how much you have to do to get it into a box. And in terms of the product suite itself. So this is transitioning a little bit over to what Qunnect specifically does.
We've developed all of the instruments which you see here. We knew that we needed to do an entanglement source, which had very low loss to our quantum memories, so we started thinking about entanglement sources differently. The company uses warm vapor, so we're rubidium people, and we use warm vapor to be able to do a spontaneous four wave mixing process in the vapor itself to create narrow line width photons who are entangled in polarization space. I spend a lot of time telling people that if you wanna have useful entanglement that actually can be interfaced at the other sides of the network, you have to think about what you're actually transmitting.
Traditionally nobody was transmitting polarization qubits because they get damaged as you push them through fiber, they rotate. So we built another set of instruments in order to correct for that. So the middle instrument that you see there is an auto polarization compensator, it does a real-time check of the fiber constantly in a time multiplex way to get a real-time fidelity reading and then calculates an automated way to sort of correct for the rotation of the fiber at that time.
So you can think of it kind of like noise canceling headphones for any fiber that you're using for quantum. And then of course validation hardware that does the timing and the protocols to validate it as well. So those first two columns are everything that sits in our quantum rack now. And then the memory of course is in its first generation and transitioning to its second generation.
And the quantum rack, which is where we're going with all this, is now out there so that people who have test beds can actually use them to be able to support protocol development. And why this is important is because we are not the only users, right? We don't wanna have our only customers be academics who like to do quantum. We want industry to use it.
And we had to build something where people could actually start crossing that divide. I think people trivialize sometimes, it's really hard to bring something outta the lab and make it commercial, but then there's another really big gap between will your commercial products sit, at least at quantum, with a bunch of non quantum scientists and can actually be used. And that's the divide we're trying to cross right now as a company. Again, we've got first efforts in this, sold the first one, that's always a big thing, because after you put it out, you never know what's going to go wrong. That's another great lesson.
So you put it out and everything was perfect when you were using it in your facility and it goes to somebody else's facility and power goes down or something, it's all of the craziness that happens when you're building hardware. We have $1.8 million in purchase orders this year, for a quantum company, that's huge.
So these are not contracts coming in, these are actual people buying hardware. And the rack itself is named Gotham because it supports the same protocol that we were doing that David had mentioned earlier. So our big moment this year is that we demonstrated on our own network that we could distribute entanglement for over two weeks at a time while maintaining very high fidelity. And that fidelity, of course, is assured by that polarization compensation device that I mentioned before. And also by the fact that the photons that we're putting into the system themselves have narrow line width because it's from our atomic system and the source itself is rather pure. So all of that ended up being a very nice press story, which is good. We could have kept it on longer,
but one of the funny things about quantum, is you have limited number of detector channels, and if we wanted to do anything else in the lab, we needed to take it offline so we could continue doing development, so that's why it was two weeks and not a month. All right, so on the lessons learned side of this, I think I've mentioned one of these other things. The first statement there is something that I mentioned a few moments ago. It is very difficult to develop technology and develop the market simultaneously. So as a community we have to keep that in mind and we have to support each other because I think VC only care about the latter part of that, what is the market that you were actually going to try to fit in? Product market fit is an evolving story and we actually need to listen to the community around us in order to be able to meet those stories. And I think you can never underestimate the amount of education you need to do to non-experts.
And those experts exist, of course, in the investor market, but also customers and government offices. I think if you don't educate them, they don't know where your technology sits and what the power of the technology possibly can be. I'm also a big believer in the fact that a rising tide lifts all boats. I think quantum technology needs success stories. Every single time you talk to a VC and they say, "What's the M and A in your field?" And if I can't answer that question and I care about the answer, that tells you that we need more success stories. And it will be good for all of the quantum community to have that.
And then I think one of the things which has been frustrating, and I hope that for the government people who are here that you take this to heart because it's something we've experienced as a startup company, I think government regulations disproportionately hurt startups. Most of the larger companies which are out there, particularly the hyperscalers in our industry, have plenty of lawyers on staff and they already know how to skirt all of the sort of loopholes and other things to be able to not be trapped by the same problems. We need to be aware of the fact that startups need encouragement and they are not necessarily cheating the government by trying to work with the international researcher pool that we have, I mean, that is the reality of science PhDs in this country. And also trying to have first customers in someplace other than the United States. And then finally, hype is irresponsible. So for any of you who've seen me give a talk before, I am one of these people that believes we should really talk about where the industry is and that we shouldn't...
Certainly be very careful about the fact of making everyone believe that in five years, you're going to have something extraordinary. We need to be careful about the timelines we project. And if we wanna think about product market fits, particularly in quantum networking, I want you just to think about the digital internet story. So it took 20 years of co-evolution of hardware, protocols and infrastructure, just to get to the point where we start talking about something called the worldwide web, in 20 years, right? The more extraordinary thing is it took another 20 years before you were streaming your Netflix, right? I mean this is... I mean, think about the product market fits story in 1969 when you start talking about the digital internet. Were they saying, "Oh, you're gonna be streaming cat videos" Nobody was going to ever think that this was going to evolve in this way, but I want you to think about those timelines because I think it's important that we as an industry are realistic with both government and venture capitalist about what we can do in what kind of time and the potential of these things.
So just as I am... A few more slides here. I think that as we think about the quantum internet, we personally at our company, we're innovating solutions that are built around trying to take standard telecom fiber infrastructure, which is everywhere, and utilize it for quantum networking.
We solved one simple problem, but it was hard to solve, and that's distributing quantum information while maintaining fidelity over that infrastructure, so we're kind of an infrastructure company. But what does infrastructure do? It empowers all of these other quantum applications. And it's not just quantum secure networking, there's a lot of talk now about quantum data centers, how you're gonna connect things. There's also a lot of talk about if you can use quantum sensors in a powerful way, if you could array them perhaps that be even better.
The sectors themselves are not huge. This is the latest numbers from the study that was done by McKinsey. So every time they release it each year, they do five more years worth of projections and it bumps up about 5 billion on each one of those numbers, which is always obviously good for us, but whenever VCs look at this, they're like, "Eh, it's not the biggest numbers out there." But for the networking sectors, it's dominated a lot by government and defense.
I think that's no surprise, but I think you're going to see that's true for most of these industries. Government and defense have a different risk profile, they can afford to adopt things earlier than finance and data centers, which carry private liability. And of course, there's always the standards discussion. This is something that we should just be aware of as an industry and I think we're starting to see a lot of government movement there, which is good. On Qunnect's side, for us to do market de-risking, we've also realized how important it is to work with partners.
We want to take our platform technology, which took us four years to get to this point, and start designing custom protocols on that platform in order to find scalable market opportunities. And you just see a list of a number of our opportunities there. But when when industry like Cisco gets involved, that's great, because they start to tell you what to design towards. And while we might have been very good at being able to identify what products needed to be built, when it comes to use cases, a lot of times those products need to be tuned and engineered in order to meet what industry actually wants to use them for.
So it's an exciting time for Qunnect as we start to look at the market de-risking phase of our world. We have 4,000 square feet of R&D space in the Brooklyn Navy yard. We built that as part of our last investment. You can see, it's probably the most number of quantum manufacturing people in the center there. They were all sitting there doing something recently for one of our deliveries and I was like, "Oh, take a picture." So in the upper right hand side, that's our manufacturing space, space, two benches, with a bunch of shelves.
We have basic research facilities and of course our computational design area. The two founders, Mehdi and Maël, were the graduate students you saw in that earlier photo, work as our CSO and our CTO respectively. We have another 18 people beyond us that make all of these amazing things happen. And you can tell from the general age of all of them, innovation comes from the young and we're very excited to support them as they continue to do great things. And at Qunnect, we believe in hardware, not hype, so thank you again for the opportunity to speak here today.
(audience applauding) - Well, thank you very much. And we have time for some questions. - [Audience Member] So you showed a timeline of, I guess, the development of the classical internet earlier. Do you find that all the protocols and hardware and I guess existing infrastructure is more of a holds back, or does it help the development of the quantum net? - That's always a tough question, right? So quantum doesn't do well in any of the normal optical instrumentation problems.
So if you have optical amplifiers on a line, you destroy the quantum. And of course, most of our fiber infrastructure has that. The fibers that we rented in New York were literally in existing cables. They are dark fiber in the sense that they don't have these other optical elements on them.
There are passive things, like DWMs and other things, that you can put into these circuits and not damage the quantum. But other than that, the oldest sections of fiber that were in the loops that we rented were there from the late '80s. So they literally were sort of existing and not with anything special going on. So I would say yes, we need the little asterisk that it can't have other classical stuff on it, but at the same time, you can use existing fiber in the ground. - [Audience Member] Hey, thanks for speaking. It was a very inspiring, actually uplifting story about the story arc of quantum technologies.
So I'm very happy to see words like hardware not hype on a board here in front of an audience this big. How do you identify hype, what are the characteristics? Is it really just the timelines we project? Are there other things to look out for, to know like what's real and what's just being sort of trumped up. - Sigh, right. I think that's... So part of the hype is because even in academia we've understood that when we write papers, the first paragraph or two has to tell the world why it's useful, and very often that's a huge stretch. So this idea of constantly needing to justify, I think is not simple.
So that's where some of the hype comes from. The second part of the hype comes from the fact that science writers are motivated to really pump up the headlines. So sometimes it's coming from perhaps the science communication side where it may have started as a small message and it snowballed to be something huge. But I would say in industry, my problem with the hypesters, is that they've given VC a completely unrealistic idea of what's deliverable. And again, small companies are motivated to be able to explain that, "Of course we're going to do it for $1 million in five years, no problem," because they need the money. And I think that that's sort of a...
The problem is the missed opportunity to educate the investors on timelines and real potential. And I don't know, again, I the solution to it to me is the fact that we shouldn't be ashamed that things take time and we shouldn't be ashamed of the fact that we need investment to do these things. I think you're seeing it with the hyperscalers now, it's not like they're not putting huge amounts of cash behind their efforts in quantum computing, you're just not seeing it flashed in the headlines constantly.
And then every startup company goes against this problem of, "I raised only 5 million, what can you do with the 5 million?" So of course the headlines get larger and larger. I really dislike, my last little note on hype, when people decide to advertise something that doesn't exist. So I think the last problem of this is we should make it very clear if we are giving slides and the slides are all sort of cartoon schematics and renderings, that this is a work in progress. You do not need to tell people that it is here today, even though it might unlock some funding. Thank you for the question and comments.
- [Audience Member] I really enjoyed your talk. So my question is, you said that your company is the three of you plus 18 more. Can you speak some to the background of those 18? Because as was mentioned earlier, there's so few quantum specific degree programs and such a variety of paths into the quantum startup world. - Yes, of course.
So we have five card carrying quantum PhDs. They're all AMO physicists, I'm the odd duck out, with having the condensed matter background. We hired them originally... So with our very first grant we hired two AMO physicists to help us with our very first projects. And as we continued to get grants, we used it as a way to hire PhDs along the way.
The rest of the company. So business was actually our last last hires, which is funny, right? So I was the only business team member for a number of years and arguably not a... I don't have an MBA, so arguably not that "businessy." The software development team was the last of our hires, because until we had the hardware, it didn't make a lot of sense to do more than just enabling software. Now we have five software developers, five quantum physics PhDs.
The manufacturing side plays to what was mentioned earlier in terms of more junior degree programs. So we have three people that we originally hired as technicians, which went over and became our manufacturing staff, they all have bachelor's in physics or engineering, sometimes those combined three, two programs, none of which had any quantum experience when they came in. And I have to say arguably, because they're undergraduates, they also had no optics experience.
So the onboarding time of people who have those junior degree programs is very long. One of our most valued optical engineers right now is somebody who was with us when he literally rolled out with just a BA in mathematics and physics from Stony Brook University. He now is like really one of the strongest optical engineers out there probably, because he is been critical to everything that we've been building. And then we have some people from the physics instrumentation, MBA program, oh not MBA--Master of Science programs. Stony Brook has this... Again, it's a layover of what they used to do with Brookhaven.
So they had people who specialize in building physics instrumentation, which is kind of in that applied physics world. We have three people from that program. - [Scott] Scott Link with Artificial Brain. And just a quick question for you. Could you tell about your journey to getting grant money from a business standpoint? What point in your company, I guess, did you get the money? How did you go about writing the grants? Were they federal or state or were they given by university? Just a little about that journey would be awesome. - Yeah, that's a great question.
SBIR grants, I mean this is one of those dirty little secrets, they are written very differently than academic grants. So even if you think you know something about writing grants when you were writing them in the university, it does not apply. It's a very different set of reviewers. We were very blessed that I think it's just timing worked out, the Department of Energy was funding instruments that were quantum support instruments basically in quantum networking.
They had a larger idea of trying to build quantum repeaters and quantum memories were all the rage at the same time the company was spinning out. Our very first DOE SBIR was based on the quantum memory, so we as a company decided this is what we're going to do, 'cause this is what we're paid to do. During that time, during the pandemic, the Air Force had a quantum collider announcement for STTRs. From my soap box, I think STTRs are not good for small companies, but that could be another discussion for another time over drinks. But SBIRs are very good for companies because you don't have to give 30% of it to an academic institution that moves at a different speed that you do and has no accountability. There's a lot of stuff going on there.
But the Air Force decided that they were going to fund quantum instrumentation and the DOE continued to fund quantum instrumentation, so I would say those two were our hubs in the early days. Those have changed and it's not where it used to be. We actually have no funding right now from either one of those agencies. When we received our first investment, which was eight and a half million, our investors actually asked us to not take phase one and phase twos, 'cause they were too slow.
Basically you get 150 to $250,000 for the phase ones, which take you a few months to apply and then receive and then another nine to 12 months of performance, only to then apply again to try to do the phase two, which takes a few months to realize whether that's right or not, and then two years of performance, or a year and a half with some of the Air Force stuff. It's a slow trajectory and sometimes venture capital doesn't want you to take it for the seemingly smaller amounts of money. So I think that's just a FYI, that sometimes they ask you to sort of step out of that loop.
I think, to educate the community here about something that I did not know anything about and something which is available, the intelligence community doesn't have typical grant calls. You don't ever see those as the same public announcements. In-Q-Tel, which is invested in a large number of quantum companies in the United States, which is affectionately called the venture capital arm of the CIA. In-Q-Tel brokers what they call work programs for specific parts of the intelligence community that would like to have ideas proven out. And they act as the entity that can blind you from the intelligence customer.
And those can be very valuable. So anyone who has not had a conversation with In-Q-Tel and wants to do something in quantum, I highly recommend you find some folks to talk to there. Thank you. - Just one more. - [Audience Member] This is from the virtual Q&A. What are the challenges for building quantum routers and switches? - Plenty. (chuckling)
So I think the hard part about anything in quantum networking, right, is that you have to find processes that don't damage the quantum. The reason we were so proud of the ability to distribute entanglement for these long periods of time is it's very fragile. So the challenge out there is can you build something which is a router or a switch, which is actually not going to interfere with the quantum, or actually be fully reversible. So in the the case of our quantum memory, that's a reversible process, so it's quantum compatible. Some of the switching processes that people have been proposing are in that same vein, but you have to have something that doesn't measure. So heralding is important, reversibility is important, these are all things that define whatever quantum routers and switches will be.
- Any other questions? - Hi. - I have a very- Can I ask a very quick one? - Do you need the mic? You can have this mic. - I don't.
Just very quickly. So you mentioned in your presentation about the challenge of national versus international collaboration, right? And this is very much a pre-competitive stage for quantum science and technology. Do you have any thoughts on how the government might want to meaningfully balance collaboration versus competition from your perspective? - Yeah, thank you. That's a great question.
I think all of us that are on the academic side know that Europe has a extraordinary ecosystem of quantum scientists. There have been a number of treaties which have gotten a fair amount of press between European governments and the UK government and the US and also Australia. So there've been a number of documents signed in DC. The problem is those are not signed by the DOD. So things start to get complicated when our technology is starting to become critical technologies. And I think where we've seen the sovereignty thing play out...
So for instance, in our industry, the Euro QCI had an initiative to put a quantum network in every 27 member states of Europe. We knew very early on that very likely they were only going to accept European companies as vendors. So we felt pressured to be able to establish a European entity in order to make that work, but we were constantly dealing with this problem of are we having problems with our export regulatory compliance if we have this? So if you're just a sales office versus something that's developed in another country, it changes it. If you actually export your manufacturing techniques, you're in a completely different bucket.
So I think Qunnect in particular has struggled a little bit with this because quantum encryption was actually a very clearly defined in ITAR standards early on, even before Qunnect got started. And encryption technologies is a very giant bucket. So knowing whether you're in it or not requires lots of expensive lawyers, which is also unfortunate, but yes.
- Well, thank you very much. And let's thank our speaker again. - Thank you. (audience applauding)
2025-01-09 12:09
