Q-CTRL at the IBM Q Summit

Last week our Founder and CEO, Michael J Biercuk, attended the IBM Q Summit in Yorktown Heights.

In April 2018 Q-CTRL joined the inaugural group of trusted startups in the IBM Q Network at an event in Palo Alto, CA. Just over a year later we returned to the IBM Q Summit at the IBM Research facility in Yorktown Heights, where their efforts in quantum computing all began.

Of course it was fantastic to reconnect with friends from the startup sector, University partners, and the team at IBM. The familiar faces and tremendous hospitality of our hosts made for a really enjoyable event.

A lot has changed in that year - with Q-CTRL transforming from an four-moth-old newborn into an established global leader in the quantum computing market.

It was thrilling to look back at the talk I gave at the IBM Q launch in 2018 and see how much progress we've made. We now have commercial customers, new major research partners, and products in the market.

I was grateful for the opportunity to share our story and our progress in an invited presentation to the Summit, highlighting our recent release of Open Controls, and our research efforts demonstrating new noise characterization routines on the IBM Q hardware systems.

But demonstrating our live products was really the most rewarding experience. It was quite a showstopper when I was able to demo Black Opal live on an enormous triple-monitor setup in the IBM Think Labs.

For the experts in the audience, the ability to access cutting-edge quantum control solutions exportable in Qiskit-compatible formats was clearly top of mind. But for the end users from finance and broader industry, our interactive Bloch spheres stole the show.

Bloch Sphere - High Contrast

It's extremely gratifying to see that something we built has resonated so strongly with customers in the market. If you haven't already, try Black Opal, complete with our visualization tools, for free.

I'm excited to think where we'll be next year!

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