This week’s podcast guest and his team are moving quantum computing forward in Europe like no one else and they want to make it the new hotspot for the technology.

His name is Jan Goetz and the company he co-founded and now is the CEO of is the German-Finnish startup IQM, which has just recently been all over the news because it received another 39 million Euros in funding. This round, which was led by deep-tech-investor MIG Fonds, adds the total amount of funding up to 71 million Euros. And with that support IQM as a European player enters the race for quantum computing which has so far been mostly between the big tech companies from the US and China. 

This podcast episode is all about building up a company around a technology which is not even fully developed yet but which is expected to have a huge impact on all of us. Even if at the moment we’re still talking about research machines as Jan stresses, the vision is huge: 

And if this only partly becomes true, then it will really, really revolutionize society in many, many aspects. So it's still a big promise, but I think we have pretty good chances to see the impacts on society.

In conversation with Bits & Pretzels podcast host Britta Weddeling Jan talks about 1) what he and IQM are up to, 2) what learnings he has to share as a founder and person from IQM’s journey and 3) what potential he sees for this fascinating technology for every single one of us in the future!