‘If Technology Isn’t Competitive, “Made in Europe” Won’t Help’

Jan Henrik Leisse is in no hurry to sell the dream of a miracle machine. The eleQtron chief executive says quantum computers won’t wipe out classical ones, and he sounds happier talking about practical use cases than about splashy forecasts. That may be a useful attitude at a moment when his company, a spinoff from the University of Siegen, has just raised a €57 million Series A led by Schwarz Digits and the EIC Fund.

Leisse sees the strongest near-term value in three areas: materials and chemistry, pharmaceuticals and drug development, and complex optimization in fields like logistics, energy and industrial processes. Even there, he expects the first serious deployments to be hybrid ones, with quantum machines handling only part of the work. He won’t pin that down to a year, but he does think the period up to the early 2030s could mark the shift from experiments to the first economically relevant applications.

He is much less impressed by the grander pitches. No, quantum computers will not suddenly replace every classical system. No, they are not about to cure cancer tomorrow. They are specialized tools, and for many jobs classical supercomputers will still be the better option. For Leisse, credibility matters more than spectacular promises, especially in a field that still has major scientific and technical hurdles.

That caution extends to security. “Harvest now, decrypt later” is already a live risk, he says, because encrypted data can be stolen today and broken later when quantum machines get strong enough. Banks, government agencies and critical infrastructure operators should start moving to post-quantum cryptography now, not wait for some announced Q-Day. Large IT systems take years to migrate, and the clock is already running for data that has to stay secret for 10 or 20 years.

On the hardware side, eleQtron is betting on ion traps controlled with microwaves rather than lasers, a choice Leisse says should make scaling easier because microwave tech is easier to miniaturize. The company is also working with Research Fab Microelectronics Germany on chip production, but Leisse says the real job right now is still process development and repeatability, not bragging about output numbers. Europe, in his view, has the science. The open question is whether it can turn that into industrial companies that can actually ship.