“Since backing the very first commercial quantum computer company in 2003, I’ve been optimistic about the field’s massive potential impact on human progress and overall social capability, but pessimistic about its commercial time frames,” says DCVC Co-Founder and Managing Partner Matt Ocko. “The DCVC team has continued to be a leader in quantum computing and the overall quantum technology space, making judicious investments over the last 20 years in a significant majority of its leading and commercially successful companies. But now we are seeing a compression of both the timeframe and the risk along the path to business-relevant quantum computing.”
Specifically, we are seeing:
- New qubit modalities with higher factory yields, longer coherence times, and higher fidelity
- Practical and powerful error correction codes
- Benchmarking frameworks that show which modalities are becoming credible engineering ventures
- Industrial applications with real customers and near-term revenue
- Long-horizon upside in areas like drug discovery and energy.
Individual physical qubits are still too noisy and fragile to support meaningful computation. But we’re learning how to manufacture them cheaply enough to make redundancy affordable, and how to yoke them together into logical qubits where math can smooth out the noise. That’s the “silicon moment” for quantum computing — and it’s the difference between a physics experiment in a university clean room and an industrial platform that can function as part of a national computing strategy.
