Celebrating 100 Q-CTRL employees
Today our team has hit a major milestone - I’m thrilled to announce we’ve reached 100 employees! 🎉
This is something exceptional to be celebrated in our team as it speaks to not only growth, but traction and longevity.
I founded Q-CTRL nearly six years ago with an ambition to make quantum technology useful through our specialized expertise in quantum control engineering. I knew we had something special technically, and our challenge was to bring that to the world.
We began with a focus on developing a new generation of scientific software powered by our unique insights. And over the years we’ve grown our work to include a professional engineering team, the world’s largest team of PhD-level experts in quantum control, an exceptional quantum sensing R&D team, and likely the best single product team in the quantum industry. And recently we’ve expanded to include team members focused on operations, marketing, and sales.
The global team we’ve built - now with offices in Sydney, Los Angeles, Berlin, and the UK - is truly leading the way in the quantum sector, achieving things no one else can, and making a mark on the development of this technology. This is why we provide solutions to most major quantum computing companies, sell to some of the world's largest consultancies, and are delivering on major international defense contracts.
As we look forward we will continue to focus on hires that deliver major value to our organization while allowing us to scale. That means a greater operational and leadership focus to help us execute and deliver on our core strategic initiatives.
I appreciate that others in our sector have crossed the 100-employee threshold faster than we have. For a while I worried that perhaps we were not moving aggressively enough and potentially ceding positional advantage. We've recently been saddened to see that some peers who have grown rapidly have had to retrench employees. Seeing these dynamics has made clear to me that our growth trajectory is actually an outward representation of our careful stewardship of the capital we have, and our focus on efficiency and profitability as our key drivers.
Our staff growth has been strong and steady at approximately 40-50% per year. It has never moved backwards. And it has always focused on how we support the next stage of our revenue growth. We continue to consistently build our team even under unfavorable market conditions, because our revenue and commercial traction continue to expand.
This focus on careful strategic growth is what has enabled us to achieve consistent 2-3x annual revenue growth in a deep tech field while still burning almost 5x less cash than others in our sector.
It’s how we’ve landed major commercial partnerships with industry, academia, and government clients - from IBM Quantum to the Australian Department of Defence.
And it’s how we ended up raising the world’s largest Series B for a quantum software company at over US$52M in a time of major VC contraction.
So this milestone carries all the more joy for us. It shows that our unique way of doing things is working. And more than that it shows that Q-CTRL is a place where the best talent in the world wants to work with us and contribute to our mission.
I’m personally grateful for everyone who has embraced our vision and values, and committed to working towards one of today’s most ambitious goals - enabling an entire new generation of quantum technologies. In particular I’d like to thank all of the OGs who have been there since day one: Robert Love, Michael Hush, and Damien Metcalf.
We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. I’m glad to have found 99 fellow travelers who embrace the challenges in life in the same way that I do. And I’m looking forward to the many more who will join us in the coming years.
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