Infleqtion, Inc. Citi’s 2026 Global TMT Conference

Welcome, Matt. Thanks for having me, Ata.

It is great to be here.

Sure. Just some casual quantum mechanics as you all digest your lunch. First of all, at the highest level, or maybe a show of hands, and we did this at the panel this morning too, for those who came. But when I say quantum, how many people have a general idea what that means? Or how many people have spent time on quantum? Okay, like half the audience. A little bit? Okay. Well, at the highest level, when we say quantum, we're talking about the world of the very small. So it's the atomic and the subatomic levels, and there's a whole different set of physics that rule the day down there, and it's called quantum mechanics. It's very bizarre. There's some phenomena that take place down at the world of the very small that we don't experience in our day-to-day basis.

The reason why all that matters is because what we, with our neutral atom technology and other quantum companies are doing, is harnessing those bizarre quantum mechanical principles and then turning them into useful technologies. The reason why all this matters is that this is a kind of a new vector of technology acceleration that we've tapped into that allows us to bring new products to market that can do things that classical technologies have not been able to do. That can range from building very precise sensing equipment, all the way to building quantum computers that will do types of computation that classical computers can't do and really never will be able to do based upon the digital nature of the architecture.

Our modality, neutral atoms, is, and the word modality basically means how are you taking advantage of those quantum mechanical principles and turning them into useful products. Our modality, neutral atoms, is a highly flexible modality. It can address both the quantum sensing and the quantum computing opportunity. At the end of the day, I actually have it in my pocket, what are we doing? We are using these quantum chips that we build. We're trapping atoms inside these quantum chips. We're interacting with them with lasers, and then we're turning those atoms and their quantum mechanical properties into these useful suite of products that I'd mentioned. We can excite individual atoms and use their electron energy transition from excited to ground state as the ticking of a clock. That clock is about 1,000 times more precise than any other clocks out there.

And we can do all sorts of other sensing applications with those same atoms. Then ultimately, we can address each individual atom and turn each atom into a qubit, which is a quantum bit, the quantum analog of a bit, and entangle those atoms with other colors of light in the form of lasers. Then those entangled atoms become the basis for the quantum calculations that we're doing on our computers. So what is the neutral atom modality? It's a way of taking advantage of those quantum mechanical properties I talked about and turning them into useful products.

Well, before I came to Infleqtion to be here full time, I was actually the first investor in the company, and was actually a technology analyst for many years at a firm called Maverick Technology Partners. I've come to this conference for- It's not my inaugural conference. I've been coming here since 2006. But yes, my inaugural fireside chat as a company. I did a pretty wide overview of the quantum market at that point in time, and this is late 2017, early 2018. The conclusion that I walked away with was really twofold. Number one, the risk-reward at that point in time was actually just as good to start something from scratch as it was to bet on an existing company. I partnered with a professor at the University of Colorado, and that was effectively the beginning of Infleqtion.

But probably more importantly was that this neutral atom modality was very intriguing to me. It was largely at first because of the flexibility. As opposed to being a binary bet on whether you could turn this technology into a useful quantum computer at some point in time, we could really kind of follow NVIDIA's monetization strategy and take this powerful neutral atom technology and point it at some of these more near-term applications in the sensing market and build a good business off of that. At the same time, start to explore the R&D to see if this would be a useful candidate for quantum computing. Fast-forward from 2018 till today, I've been surprised by both sides of the equation, but I kind of knew we could build a good business in sensing.