National Quantum Mission to extend grants to 15 startups: Chairman Ajai Chowdhury

The National Quantum Mission will extend funds to about 15 startups and encourage them to scale up and go global, NQM Governing Board Chairman Ajai Chowdhury said here on Monday.

There have been some good products developed, especially in cryptography, and the mission is working towards getting various software companies to invest in quantum (ie quantum technologies, the four verticals of which, according to NQM are computing, communication, measurement, and sensing), he said.

He was speaking at the inauguration of the International Conference on Quantum Communication, Measurement and Computing (QCMC 2024) being held at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras here from August 26 to 30.

"We were surprised to see that some were already working in quantum (technologies). We want them to take products from India that have already been developed to a global level," he said at the sixteenth edition of the conference -- the first to be held in India.

"Within the next three months, we will be handing grants to 10 to 15 good startups. We want to see them grow, scale, and go global," Ajai Chowdhury said.

"After the National Quantum Mission launch, we had an overwhelming response with close to 385 proposals received to set up thematic parks and other areas of quantum technologies," he said and added that the NQM would make the announcement soon.

"The plan is to set up four independent Section 08 companies in which the thematic parks will be housed -- Computing, Communications Sensing and Materials. The whole objective is to bring together all researchers under the thematic hub. In addition, we felt that we must involve startups in a big way. We wrote to about 40-odd startups and we met about 14 startups to understand where we are,” he said.

Lauding IIT-M for bringing the conference to India, he said a tremendous amount of work was already going on in India, especially at IIT Madras.

"As we started to work on the National Quantum Mission, we started to look how many scientists and PIs are working in this field and found that India had around 600 scientists and 40 to 50 startups as well in quantum technology,” he added.

Prof V Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras; Prof Mete Atature, Chair, Steering Committee, QCMC 2024, University of Cambridge, UK; and Prof Prabha Mandayam, local organizing committee, CQuICC, IIT Madras, spoke at the event. Prof Raghunathan Rengaswamy, Dean (Global Engagement), IIT Madras, released the CQuICC newsletter.

Prof Mark Wilde, Cornell University, delivered the opening plenary talk on ‘Exact Solutions for the Fundamental Limits of Communication, Discrimination, and Estimation of Bosonic Dephasing Channels.’