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The world came to a standstill in 2020, but the Quantum story continued to accelerate. IQM became one of the fastest-growing companies in the quantum computing sector.
We ended 2020 with an international team of 50+ quantum engineers and the number of employees in total is 80+ working in Espoo, Finland, and Munich, Germany.
IQM has secured over €71M of funding from private investors and public entities.
IQM hit several significant milestones which was also covered in global media. IQM was featured in dozens of articles all over the world during 2020. A quick recap of these milestones include:
Quantum computing has started to gain strong interest from governments and national authorities, institutions, business leaders and private equity worldwide, and the year 2020 was an exceptional year for all related quantum in this regard.
After Google’s late 2019 quantum related article in the scientific journal Nature, and the following media coverage, things started to move very fast. The potential of the second quantum revolution with scientists efficiently controlling quantum effects, and ultimately bringing quantum computing to life, was rising to the limelight.
The swift technological advances of today and the great potential of quantum computing are the reasons why every major industry and leading organization has started to invest in quantum computing and build the critical quantum competencies.
Quantum computing does have an extremely high barrier of entry though, and there is a tremendous shortage for top-tier talent mostly consisting of postdoctoral scientists and quantum engineers. Also, the competition over this expertise can be fierce in the coming years.
Even though this rapidly emerging new industry is based on exceedingly complicated science and engineering, it is important to realize that it is nonetheless a level playing field for anyone, and not just for the top corporations and economies of the world. In this respect, we might start to see surprises and fundamental shifts in the concentration of knowledge and skills in the upcoming years.
Global competition over quantum leadership will become ever more important in the coming years, and the EU has a great standing in this regard so far.
Today, there is a growing number of companies and institutions dipping their toes in quantum computing by forming collaborations and partnerships between quantum startups and academia as they make their transition out of research into the industry.
It is estimated that Europe has approximately 69 quantum computing related startups founded since the year 2010 1, whereas in the United States the number is 53 currently 2. Perhaps this difference can be explained by the quality of the European academic research on quantum technologies. Also, according to a study 3, most of the scientific research papers on quantum physics have come from Europe.
The strong commitment to fundamental scientific research and engineering in Europe has many times proven to successfully bear fruit. The cooperation between the research and commercial industries has yielded supersonic commercial airplanes, bullet trains and the massive EU-lead international collaboration to build the world’s largest and highest-energy particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
If the EU can also decisively build, for instance a significant global aerospace pioneer Airbus, similar great cooperation between the research and commercial industries could be applied to build quantum computers as well. It is an opportunity for the EU nation states to collaborate, move faster and eventually be more successful together, and thus ensure access to this important new technology in the field of quantum computing.
1 EU: Alex Kiltz, The European Quantum Computing Startup Landscape:
https://medium.com/uvc-partners-news/the-european-quantum-computing-startup-landscape-a115ffe84ad8
2 USA: Tracxn, Quantum Computing Startups in United States:
https://tracxn.com/explore/Quantum-Computing-Startups-in-United-States
3 Quantum Technologies Flagship High-level Steering Committee, Quantum Technologies Flagship Final Report:
IQM is helping companies and organizations to develop a strong capability in quantum computing. We have a unique way of utilizing design thinking in our approach to quantum leadership.
Our creative approach is to bring application-specific problem solving to a multitude of industries by also understanding the industry problems in a profound way. Through combining hardware and software design in developing quantum processors, we can bring application-specific capabilities to our clients.
This approach is one of a kind as it offers entirely new avenues for health care, machine learning, financial modeling, materials science, and chemistry, and it has the potential to massively speed up discoveries and breakthroughs in science and engineering.
Quantum computing is more and more regarded as a disruptive technology, one that holds a great promise of revolutionizing many industries and bring well-being to each one of us.
We continue to build world-leading quantum computers for the well-being of humankind, now and for the future. And in this quest, we continue to bring together people with extraordinary ambition and talent.
Working at IQM means that you can work on the hardest challenges that we currently have in the world. You also collaborate with global scientific communities and have the freedom to truly change the world.
When we are creating something so unique, there are no crazy ideas, no limits, just sparkles of innovation.
This year, let’s discover the next breakthroughs together!
