There’s a lot to be said for challenging a stereotype. Richard Murray, co-founder and CEO of ORCA Computing is on stage at a recent Economist Impact Commercialising Quantum event in London. He’s a confident, relaxed speaker and has already referred to doing “cool stuff” with photonics. He goes on to speak about new customers, such as the Montana State University (MSU), and the need to “go outside” with quantum – out of the lab and into the real world.

It’s a far cry from the pervasive quantum computing image – a fledgling industry still dominated by theory, and (mainly) men in research labs. The event was a good illustration of where the industry currently sits and there are some promising signs of progress, as we revealed in our recent write-up of the event. As well as the likes of IBM, Google, Nvidia and Microsoft, there are a few start-ups leading the hardware charge (Alice & Bob, Pasqal, QuEra and Atom Computing, for example) and ORCA is certainly among the frontrunners.