Quantum Builders
From Quantum Physics to Venture Capital: Building the Global Quantum Ecosystem
A fireside chat with:
Christophe Jurczak
This article is based on a conversation between Christophe Jurczak and Daniel Rodán Legrain as part of the Quantum Builders series, sponsored by Qblox. Watch the full webinar for more on venture capital, cap tables, and where the quantum ecosystem is headed.
Christophe Jurczak finished his PhD in quantum physics under Alain Aspect in 1996, back when there was no such thing as a quantum industry to join. He spent the years after in the French Ministry of Defense, in renewable energy roles across Europe and the US, and eventually as CEO of a solar company in San Francisco before quantum pulled him back in. In 2018, he co-founded Quantumation, one of the first venture funds built specifically around early-stage quantum technology and deep physics. It now holds stakes in more than 40 companies, including Pasqal, Qubit Pharmaceuticals, and Qblox.
Looking back at how much the field has opened up since his own PhD, Jurczak measures the shift in a simple way. "You can get a job in the field where you study. I could not do it 30 years ago. You can do it now," he said.
Jurczak is direct about what he weighs before anything else in a deal. "For me, it's really the science, actually. I really need to fall in love with the science," he said. Founders need outstanding, peer-reviewed work and something distinctive enough to beat competitors chasing the same problem, but he doesn't expect a finished product at the earliest stage. "We cannot ask for a product market fit at the beginning, like from day one," he said.
What he does look for beyond the lab results is whether a founding team can take direction. "Sometimes we pass on deals because there's definitely, let's say, human relationship issue," he said, describing coachability as one of the quieter factors in an early check.
Jurczak built Quantumation around a gap he saw in how generalist funds approached deep tech. "I think most of them, probably 90% of them, don't have a clue about exactly what's going on in the lab and what the challenges are," he said of typical VCs evaluating hardware-heavy science. His own years spent, in his words, turning knobs and aligning lasers during a PhD, shaped how the fund reads a company's timeline. "It always takes more time than people think, that's for sure. It never gets faster," he said of moving science from a lab bench to a working chip or device.
One structural issue recurs in Jurczak's due diligence: how founders divide equity before a fund ever gets involved. "It's really, really important that the founders don't get diluted too fast," he said. "It's their company. They need to feel that." He points to founders giving away 5 to 10 percent to a university or PhD advisor early on as a pattern that looks small at first and compounds into a real problem later. "Cap table management is something founders tend to underestimate," he said.
Quantumation is a venture fund, not a lender, and Jurczak is candid about what that requires from the companies it backs. "We're not a bank, we're a VC fund. It needs to be explosive in a way," he said. A device that makes life easier for a handful of research labs and brings in a few million dollars a year can be a real business, but it isn't the outcome his fund is built around. He sees this as partly cultural, contrasting founders who aim to build a solid mid-sized company with those who aim to lead a global market. "I think in a way anything is possible" once a founder has that mindset, he said, while acknowledging that funding and ecosystem support still have to follow.
Jurczak sees two competing strategies among quantum computing startups. Some chase fault-tolerant computing directly and build for the long term. Others build products and customer relationships, generation by generation, moving through analog and digital modes, with error mitigation along the way to full error correction. He said he feels more at home with the second path, one built around reliability. "You want the kind of computer that works maybe at least 80%, 90% of the time," he said, and pointed to lab setups that run closer to 20% uptime as a reminder of how far device engineering still has to go before it becomes a product.
Jurczak calls the early-stage funding environment in France exceptional. "The French ecosystem is fantastic for early stage... probably one of the best place on earth to start a company, to get to start a science-based company deep tech," he said. What Europe lacks, in his view, is capital at a later stage. "What's missing is really the late-stage funding and the access to public markets as well," he said, noting that rounds north of a hundred million euros are still harder to close with European investors alone. It's part of why Quantumation's next fund is built specifically around that gap.
Asked what success looks like in five to ten years, Jurczak doesn't describe a quantum-only future. "I don't really imagine the future for computing being pure quantum," he said. "It's really hybrid compute. Classical will be there for tasks. Quantum will never take over." What he wants to see instead is quantum hardware that holds up outside a physics lab. "Success will be, I don't know, 95% availability for a quantum computer in five years, something that you put in a data center that works," he said.
Jurczak isn't ready to bet on a single hardware approach winning out. Every major quantum computing company today, he noted, was built around one modality, ions, atoms, or superconducting circuits, largely because that's what its founding scientists knew. Whether that holds is still open. "Is it a single technology? Is it multi-technologies, multi-qubits, for example?" he asked, adding that he leans toward a future where companies combine modalities and compete more on reliable service than on qubit type alone.
Jurczak sees agentic AI tools as one of the more underrated shifts happening in quantum right now, not because they replace physicists, but because they open the door to people without a physics background. He described running programs on a neutral-atom platform himself with the help of an AI coding assistant, something that would have required deep technical training a few years earlier. "It will help a lot of people who are not necessarily trained quantum experts to have access to these technologies," he said, pointing to fields like digital humanities starting to run experiments on quantum hardware for the first time.
Quantonation's bet is that the return on quantum takes longer than a typical VC fund and pays out bigger when it lands. Getting there depends on hardware that works reliably outside the lab, which is the layer Qblox builds toward every day. If you're working on control systems that need to hold up in front of real customers, we'd be glad to talk.
Contact us to learn how Qblox supports reliable quantum hardware.
