Quantum computing startup taps Lenovo exec as its CEO and opens a Cary office
A small quantum computing startup has tapped a local Lenovo executive as its CEO and opened an office in Cary, after raising $15 million from investors.
Atom Computing, started in Berkeley, California, said Wednesday that it has hired Rob Hays, Lenovo’s former chief strategy officer, to help grow the company.
Hays will not have to move far to take the position. Lenovo’s North American headquarters is based in Morrisville, and Hays will open Atom’s North Carolina office in Cary, which will eventually be home to the company’s executive team and business functions like sales and software development.
Hays said he decided to leave Lenovo for Atom because the field of quantum computing is no longer more than a decade away from being used by customers. It has become “more tangible and is going to be more available from a productivity standpoint in three to four years,” Hays said in a telephone interview.
Quantum computing has, for some time, been viewed as the next evolution of computing — creating machines that can quickly crunch massive amounts of data and solve some of the most complex algorithms. The machines could potentially complete problems in minutes that might take a traditional computer years to finish.
Many tech firms, including IBM and Google, are trying to create quantum computers that are useful to companies and researchers.
But quantum computers are incredibly complicated to make. While classical computers work by doing calculations made up of 1s and 0s, a quantum computer approaches the calculation from a different framework. They instead take advantage of how particles operate at the subatomic level, and instead of using 1s and 0s, the computers process information in quantum bits, or qubits, a combination of a 1 and 0.
The more qubits a computer can process, the faster and stronger it is.
There are a variety of methods to creating those qubits, however, and Atom believes its approach could make it easier to scale the technology. Atom’s method uses atoms from an alkaline earth element, trapping those atoms in a vacuum chamber and then manipulates their quantum states with lasers. So far, it has been able to capture and use up to 100 atoms at a time.
Atom says its process creates stable qubits, which is necessary to use the computers for actual work.
So far, Hays said, Atom has created one generation of its quantum computer, called Phoenix. It hopes to have a second generation completed by 2023, which could begin to be used by companies in some fashion.
It has a handful of companies experimenting with its current quantum computer, including some financial services and industrial companies, Hays said.
“There is a number of use cases” for quantum computing, Hays said. “But the reality is we don’t know what the killer app is going to be. It is too early.”
He added that while it is still a small company, the progress it has made already shows it can compete with the likes of Google and IBM.
“What we believe is that while we are much smaller and getting started later than some giants,” he said, “the progress we have made with relative modest amount of investment shows that our path is quite scalable — given we have a machine the same size as what these other guys have available.”
Atom currently has around 30 employees, mostly working in research and development. The team was originally made up of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Colorado Boulder.
Hays said Atom will use money from investors to beef up its engineering and business teams. Eventually, as the technology matures, it will have to hire more software engineers to build applications that could be used on the computer.
The company’s investors include Venrock, Innovation Endeavors and Prelude Ventures. It has also received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation.
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate.
This story was originally published July 21, 2021 at 9:00 AM.
