The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology cover art

The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology

The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology

By: Sebastian Hassinger
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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.(c) New Quantum Era, LLC 2026 Physics Science
Episodes
  • Quantum Drug Discovery and the Path to Advantage with Sabrina Maniscalco

    Quantum Drug Discovery and the Path to Advantage with Sabrina Maniscalco
    Jun 15 2026
    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 Quantum Blog — Q4Bio Finalists — IBM's account of the workflow and quantum-classical integration.Funding & HQ MoveTech.eu — Algorithmiq's €18M Series B and Milan move — Coverage of Italy's largest quantum VC round to date.Quantum Computing Report — Algorithmiq Relocates to Milan — Strategic context including the Q4Bio win and IBM partnership.EU-Startups coverage — Investor lineup and Italy's National Quantum Strategy framing.Quantum Advantage & ToolingIBM Quantum Blog — The Dawn of Quantum Advantage — Includes Algorithmiq's TEM (Tensor Network Error Mitigation) function in the Qiskit Functions catalog.Algorithmiq & IBM Quantum Advantage Tracker — The heterogeneous materials experiment Algorithmiq and IBM put forward as a community benchmark.Silicon Republic interview with Sabrina — Useful prior context on her philosophy of using quantum to simulate quantum systems.Key Quotes & InsightsOn 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 ...
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    45 mins
  • Funding the Quantum Middle: Series A/B Capital with Kris Naudts and Zeynep Koruturk of Firgun Ventures

    Funding the Quantum Middle: Series A/B Capital with Kris Naudts and Zeynep Koruturk of Firgun Ventures
    Jun 8 2026
    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 Zeynep on the Series A/B bottleneck.Portfolio Companies MentionedFirgun Invests in Photonic Inc. — The Quantum Insider — Firgun's first portfolio investment in DARPA-validated Photonic Inc.Photonic Inc.'s World-First Quantum Teleportation — QC Report — Technical context on the "Entanglement First" silicon-spin/photonic architecture.Photonic Inc. Closes $200M+ Round — The Quantum Insider — Final close at a $2B valuation.Quantum Motion Raises $160M Series C — The Quantum Insider — Firgun's first European investment in silicon CMOS quantum computing.Quantum Motion's Silicon CMOS Approach — Technologies.org — Technical analysis of the CMOS scalability thesis.Key Quotes & InsightsKris 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 ...
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    46 mins
  • Quantum Book Launch with Yuval Boger

    Quantum Book Launch with Yuval Boger
    Jun 1 2026
    Why This Episode MattersYuval has a rare profile in the quantum industry: an M.Sc. in physics from Tel Aviv University, an MBA from Kellogg, two decades as a CEO and CMO in deep tech before quantum, and now the commercial lead at QuEra — the company whose neutral-atom architecture is colocated with NVIDIA H100s inside Japan's ABCI-Q supercomputer and just demonstrated 96 logical qubits from 448 physical atoms in Nature. He also hosts The Superposition Guy's Podcast and has just published Quantum Bits, a comic-book guide to quantum computing.This is a crossover conversation — Sebastian's book A New Quantum Era came out the same week — so the episode reads as two practitioners comparing their explanatory strategies, their reading of the modality race, and their honest forecasts for when a quantum computer becomes genuinely non-simulatable. If you want a candid look at how the commercial side of quantum thinks about hardware timelines, error-correction overhead, and the work of translating physics into procurement, this is the 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 Vladan Vuletić's confidence horizon for neutral atoms expanded from 5 years to 10 years in a single 18-month window — and what changedThe honest case for neutral atoms when wall-clock speed is the obvious weakness: parallelism, algorithmic fault tolerance, and a 2:1 physical-to-logical ratio for quantum memoryWhy "time to solution" — not gate speed — is the metric Yuval thinks the industry should be arguing aboutHow Shor's algorithm went from requiring a million qubits to roughly 30,000, and what that compression means for cryptographically relevant timelinesThe craft problem of explaining quantum without saying "zero and one at the same time" — and why both Yuval and Sebastian refused to use itWhat it took to make a quantum comic funny in German (the German is perfect, the joke is not)Sebastian's read on the modality race: neutral atoms short-term, superconducting mid-term, spin and photonics long-term — and Yuval's pushbackWhy Yuval thinks Sebastian's five-year forecast for a non-simulatable machine is pessimisticThe shift inside QuEra from "95% science, 5% everything else" to a company that has to ship serviceable systems and uptimeHow podcasting becomes a business development tool once the microphone is offResources & LinksGuest LinksThe Superposition Guy's Podcast — Yuval's interview show with quantum CEOs and technical leaders across computing, sensing, and communications.Quantum Bits Comics — Yuval's comic-book guide to quantum computing, including custom editions and multilingual versions.QuEra Computing — The neutral-atom quantum computing company where Yuval serves as Chief Commercial Officer.Yuval's published writing — Aggregated Forbes, HPCwire, and Built In bylines on quantum ROI, workforce, and commercialization.Papers & ArticlesQuEra and collaborators on Algorithmic Fault Tolerance (Nature, 2025) — The paper behind the claim that syndrome measurements can happen per algorithmic block rather than per operation.HPCwire coverage of the AFT result — Independent take on the 10–100x runtime overhead reduction.IEEE Spectrum on neutral-atom quantum computing in 2026 — Context for the AIST Gemini deployment and Yuval's time-to-solution argument.2026 Quantum Readiness Report, Part 2 — The survey of 291 stakeholders behind Yuval's "show-me phase" framing of the market.BooksA New Quantum Era by Sebastian Hassinger — Sebastian's outsider's introduction to quantum computing, referenced throughout the conversation.Quantum Bits: A Comic Book Guide to Quantum Computing by Yuval Boger — Yuval's illustrated explainer, with a glossary covering terms from superposition to QLDPC codes.Background Reading MentionedThe Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder — Sebastian's inspiration for the working title of his next book.Key Quotes & InsightsOn the magic of neutral atoms: "We've got this rubidium atoms, we hold them in place using tiny lasers, they're four microns apart, we shoot lasers, and then we take a photograph and see how they're doing. It's science fiction until it isn't."On the modality timeline (Yuval, paraphrasing Vladan Vuletić): Eighteen months ago Vladan was confident about neutral atoms for the next five years. Six months ago, after recent results, that confidence horizon ...
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    55 mins
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