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FROM THE EDITOR.

Hat tip to the joint paper by IBM and Pasqal, which proposes a rigorous, criteria-driven framework for quantum advantage. The work — co-authored by teams from what might be considered competing hardware approaches to quantum computing —represents a rare and important moment of cross-company (and cross-industry, I might add) alignment. More on this below, but the paper seeks to remove ambiguity around quantum advantage, defining it as when a quantum system demonstrably outperforms classical methods and produces verifiable outputs.

This approach brings much‑needed discipline to a term that has been the subject of speculative marketing and philosophical debate. By codifying testable benchmarks, IBM and Pasqal aim to foster greater trust and objective comparison across technologies. As they note, whether quantum devices outperform classical ones or vice versa, the process still reflects valuable scientific progress.

Meanwhile, SpinQ Technology, based in China, has raised a Series B funding round amounting to “several hundred million yuan” (so probably in the $14 million and up range), backed by strategic and government investors. SpinQ develops both desktop NMR quantum systems for education and superconducting quantum chips — with ambitions toward 100‑qubit devices. The new capital will fuel R&D, application expansion, and global market penetration.

Have a great weekend!

— Matt, Chief Content Officer at The Quantum Insider

INSIDER BRIEF.

• Quantum's Second Law

• SpinQ Right Round

• Australian Collaboration Emerges

• Good (Quantum) Chemistry

• Quantum Systems on The Chips

• Strangeworks is Expanding Globally

• Infleqtion Makes Chicago Connection

• Indian Quantum Startups Wanted

• Quantum Teams Join Quest to Find Endometriosis Treatments

• Light Computing

• Quantum Beach 2025 — Oct. 8.

ANALYST NOTES.

The Noteworthy & Nuanced

Lots of funding this week! SandboxAQ is providing employee liquidity by raising $95M in an oversubscribed secondary offering. The company is advancing Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) for use in defense, energy, and biopharma sectors. Lead backers include Rizvi Traverse, Forge Global, and the Ava Family Office, who called out SandboxAQ for its unique approach to cybersecurity, drug discovery, and quantum simulation.

Q.ANT absolutely qan secure funding - €62M in Series A funding to commercialize its cutting-edge photonic processors. Built on Thin-Film Lithium Niobate, the processors aim to transform AI and high-performance computing, particularly amid surging data center power demands. Backed by Cherry Ventures, UVC Partners, and imec.xpand, Q.ANT will expand globally and integrate its Native Processing Server into major data centers.

Lastly, QpiAI has raised $32M in Series A funding led by Avataar Ventures and India’s National Quantum Mission to expand its global quantum computing platform. With proprietary hardware and software, QpiAI delivers enterprise-grade solutions in drug discovery and materials science. Headquartered in India, it also operates in Finland and the US. — Alan Kanapin, Analyst at The Quantum Insider

The Research Rundown

Check out this week’s handpicked quantum research. These are studies headed for real-world impact: improving accuracy, reducing latency, using fewer resources, or solving problems classical methods struggle with. These are early developments, but they hint at where quantum might earn its keep.

• Researchers from Cleveland Clinic and IBM Quantum introduced the first quantum algorithm for protein structure prediction using a face-centered cubic lattice, enabling more biologically accurate modeling of protein conformations.

• Researchers at SSM College of Engineering, Gokaraju Rangaraju Institute of Engineering and Technology, and others developed a quantum-deep hybrid ensemble model for thyroid disease prediction that combines quantum-enhanced feature selection with deep learning to achieve 98.2% accuracy and 25ms inference time, enabling real-time clinical diagnostics.

• Researchers from Asia University, Chung Shan Medical University, Baylor College of Medicine applied hybrid quantum-classical algorithms to improve the classification of metastatic biomarkers in clear cell renal cell carcinoma, demonstrating that quantum feature embedding outperforms classical methods in handling complex, high-dimensional gene and microRNA expression data.
  
  — Cierra Choucair, Journalist & Analyst at The Quantum Insider

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INSIDER SPOTLIGHT: Researchers Offer a Measured Path Toward Quantum Advantage

➡️ A new paper from IBM and Pasqal proposes a testable framework for quantum advantage, built on two pillars: verifiable output and measurable improvement over classical methods.

➡️ The study singles out three problem classes — sampling, variational algorithms, and expectation value calculations — as the most likely candidates for early advantage.

➡️ The authors argue that hybrid strategies and error mitigation, not breakthrough algorithms, will be the real drivers of near-term progress.

➡️ While published on arXiv and not yet peer-reviewed, the paper reflects a growing consensus that credible claims must come with reproducible benchmarks, not marketing spin.

Analyst Commentary

IBM and Pasqal have teamed up to do something rare in quantum computing: define the goalposts. (Hopefully this translates for non-American football fans.) Their new joint study offers a practical, criteria-driven definition of quantum advantage — one based not on hype, but on whether a quantum device can do something better, faster, or cheaper than classical alternatives and provide results that can be verified.

That’s more than semantics. As the paper points out, quantum advantage has long been a fuzzy term — stretched to cover everything from one-off physics demos to vague roadmaps for general-purpose computing. This new framework pushes the field toward a firmer standard: trust the result, show the gain.

The authors identify three families of problems most likely to cross that bar. First are sampling tasks, where quantum circuits generate distributions of outcomes that can be statistically tested. These are hard to simulate classically but often tough to verify. Second are variational algorithms, like VQE and SQD, which estimate numbers (like molecular energies) that can be benchmarked against known values. Third are expectation value calculations, which are central to many quantum applications but highly sensitive to noise.

What ties these together is flexibility — different paths for different hardware platforms and error thresholds. There’s no silver bullet, but the study does outline a couple ideas of what a credible win might look like. A quantum circuit that estimates a chemical property more accurately than a classical solver. A sampling problem where classical simulators can’t keep up. A result that survives noise mitigation and still beats the baseline.

The collaboration itself is interesting, too. Although IBM and Pasqal have collaborated on other projects, this effort represents different hardware camps — superconducting circuits vs. neutral atoms — yet the paper treats both as viable contenders. That matters. Rather than framing quantum advantage as a winner-takes-all contest, the study suggests multiple paths can — and likely will — succeed in parallel.

It also puts error handling at the center. Full error correction is still out of reach, but the paper outlines a stack of strategies — mitigation, detection, hybrid processing — that could yield useful results long before fault-tolerant systems arrive. Both companies are already integrating their hardware into high-performance computing environments, like GENCI and Jülich, to exploit those hybrid models.

What’s more — and, we think, significant — there’s no bold claim here and no ulitmated declaration of arrival. Just a set of conditions, problem classes, and trust strategies that others can test or challenge. That’s how science works. Benchmarks are proposed. Results are debated. Classical methods catch up, then quantum tries again.

If anything, the paper is a signal that future debates over quantum advantage — and they will come — don’t have to be contentious. The bar is being set. Moving that bar, or beating it with classical tools, isn’t failure. It’s progress.

Ultimately, this is a long game. The next milestone may be modest: one quantum solver outperforming one classical method on one task. But if it passes the test, and the community agrees on the criteria, that’s a meaningful win.

And with IBM and Pasqal laying down a common framework, the field might finally be ready to agree on what a “win” looks like.

DATA SPOTLIGHT.

Physicists at the University of Oxford have set a new record for the accuracy of controlling a single quantum bit, achieving the lowest-ever error rate for a quantum logic operation—just 0.000015%, or one error in 6.7M operations. This record-breaking result represents nearly an order of magnitude improvement over the previous benchmark, set by the same research group a decade ago.

INDUSTRY HIGHLIGHTS.

🔉 The Quantum Economy Podcast, in partnership with The Quantum Insider, and hosted by Anders Indset, launches July 28 across major platforms, featuring multidisciplinary conversations on how quantum computing, AI, and biotechnology are reshaping economies, governance, and human agency.

💰️ The UK’s 2025 Compute Roadmap outlines a £2 billion strategy to overhaul national computing infrastructure, explicitly integrating quantum computing as a core long-term component.

🇮🇳 Strangeworks is expanding into India and Sri Lanka to support the region’s growing demand for quantum and AI technologies, building on national initiatives like the National Quantum Mission and a thriving innovation ecosystem.

💼 Q-CTRL has appointed Nicole Conner (Airbus Ventures) and Per Roman (Bullhound Capital) to its board of directors, reinforcing its leadership as it scales quantum infrastructure for aerospace and enterprise markets.

✅ Riverlane has deployed its Deltaflow 2 quantum error correction technology at a UK commercial data center, making it the first real-world integration of QEC alongside Oxford Quantum Circuits’ hardware.

🏦 JPMorgan Chase has appointed Rob Otter, formerly of State Street, to lead its Global Technology Applied Research group, signaling a renewed focus on quantum computing and emerging tech strategy. The leadership shift follows the departure of quantum research leader Marco Pistoia and cryptography expert Charles Lim.

🚀 Infleqtion has announced plans to build the first utility-scale neutral atom quantum computer in Illinois, supported by a $50M public-private partnership with IQMP and NQAC.

💰️ SpinQ has raised several hundred million RMB in Series B funding from both government-backed and private investors, showing strong support for its full-stack quantum computing strategy and global expansion.

🤝 IonQ has partnered with Australia-based Emergence Quantum to co-develop next-generation ion trap quantum hardware, focusing on electronics, materials, and application-specific integrated circuits for qubit control.

📓 IBM and Pasqal have proposed a rigorous, testable framework for defining quantum advantage, focusing on problems where outputs can be verified and show measurable improvements over classical methods. Their study emphasizes that managing quantum errors is the key challenge.

🔒️ BTQ Technologies has launched Léonne, a quantum-secure blockchain consensus framework that replaces Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake with a new trust-based system called Proof-of-Consensus.

🇮🇳 India’s Department of Science and Technology has opened a rolling call for quantum startups under its National Quantum Mission, offering funding, mentorship, and infrastructure through four Thematic Hubs.

🇩🇪 Q.ANT has installed its analog photonic co-processor, the Native Processing Server, at Germany’s Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, making it the world’s first integration of photonic computing into a live high-performance computing environment.

🏖️ Quantum Beach 2025, officially part of the International Year of Quantum, will take place on October 8 in West Palm Beach to broaden awareness and engagement with quantum technologies.

EVENTS.

Now -July 30 -- Womanium & WISER QUANTUM PROGRAM 2025. The 2025 Theme: Quantum solvers: algorithms for the world's hardest problems will be held Mondays & Wednesdays from 10:30 -12:00 ET. Register here.

Aug. 31– Sept. 5 -- IEEE Quantum Week 2025 will be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Sept. 16-18 -- Quantum World Congress 2025 will be held at Capital One Hall in Greater Washington. The event is a chance for the world’s quantum ecosystem to come together and bring a quantum-ready future into focus.

Sept. 24-25 -- Q2B25 Paris at Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, Paris, France.

Sept. 29-Oct. 1 -- Quantum.Tech Europe is taking place in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The event will bring together the whole quantum supply chain to drive forward the commercial applications of Quantum Technologies.

Oct. 6-10 -- 8th International Conference for Young Quantum Information Scientists (YQIS25) will take place in Barcelona, Spain. YQIS is a conference series organized by and for PhD students and early-career researchers working across the broad field of quantum information.

Oct. 8 -- The Fifth Anniversary of The City Quantum & AI Summit will take place at the Mansion House in the City of London this year with the subtitle Race for Growth.

Oct. 8 -- The Quantum Insider, in partnership with the Business Development Board of Palm Beach County and Quantum Coast Capital, will host Quantum Beach 2025, an officially recognized event of the International Year of Quantum (IYQ2025). Register here.

Oct. 13-17 -- Quantum Reference Frames 2025 will bring together leading experts on quantum reference frames and the many related subjects in the first focused event in the new era of quantum frame covariance. QRF 2025 is co-funded by the Quantum Information Structure of Spacetime consortium.

Oct. 19-21 -- Q+AI will be held in New York City. This event will uncover the coming wave of Quantum + AI, include 50+ speakers, daily mentoring sessions and 16 sessions, one continuous track.

Nov. 10-12 -- European Quantum Technologies Conference 2025 will be held at Øksnehallen, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Dec. 1-4 -- QUEST-IS 2025 Quantum Engineering Sciences and Technologies for Industry and Services From Quantum Engineering to Applications for Citizens. EDF Lab, Paris-Saclay, France.