Podcast with Anca Albu of QAI Ventures

QAI Ventures just celebrated its first anniversary as a $50 million, early-stage venture fund and startup accelerator. Anca Albu is the chief marketing officer at QAI Ventures and works with entrepreneurs to help them craft compelling stories about their work. She helped build the largest and most active angel investor network in Switzerland, so she knows what it takes to build a community of funders, mentors and supporters around a new industry. In this episode, she explains lessons learned after one year, the importance of storytelling for quantum leaders, and what’s next for her team.

Transcript

Veronica Combs: Hello, and welcome to The Quantum Spin by HKA. I’m Veronica Combs. I’m a writer and an editor here at the agency. I get to talk every day with really smart people working on really fascinating subjects, everything in the quantum industry, from hardware to software. On our podcast, we focus in on quantum communication.

And by that, I don’t mean making networks safe from hacking or entangling photons over long distance, but talking about the technology. How do you explain these complicated concepts to people who don’t have a background in science and engineering, but want to understand all the same.

Veronica Combs: Today I’m very happy to be talking with Anca Albu, who is the chief marketing officer at QAI Ventures. I know you’re just about to celebrate your first-year anniversary of the fund and the accelerator Anca.  Thanks for joining us. So tell us what you do there.

Anca Albu: What I do for QAI Ventures is quite exciting and also very dynamic as I work very closely with Alexandra, our CEO and co-founder, and Thomas, our COO. And I help shape QAI’s vision and the strategies from the ground up, basically from the beginning. And now I am in charge of all the aspects of marketing, communications, as well as running different projects.

Since we are a very small, but experienced team, we all work close together and support each other whenever we need. We have our main roles, but then we also work on the overall success of QAI Ventures. 

Veronica Combs: That’s sort of the good thing, bad thing of something brand new, right? You have to be willing to do something totally different given the day and the needs. So tell us what that’s been like over the last year. 

Anca Albu: It’s been quite a ride. And being with QAI Ventures from the beginning, it was filled with challenges. We also had to innovate a lot because this hasn’t been done before, actually, anywhere in the world to have a VC fund and Accelerator focused on quantum technologies. It was a constant drive to push the boundaries and do things in a new way. So we’ve built a culture of collaboration and forward thinking. We have a very strong, flexible and fun team. And this allowed us to shape QAI’s vision of supporting quantum entrepreneurs throughout their journey from the lab, from academia. And our plan is to support them all the way to IPO or exit, whichever direction they want to go in. And, as you said, we are quite young as a company. On February 16 we’ll have a one-year anniversary and, so far, we have raised the 50 million, early-stage to Series A VC fund together with Redstone. And we have run the inaugural accelerator batch last year, and that was a very valuable and full of learnings experience.

And we are now in the startups for our second accelerator batch that will kick off on April 8th. And for all the audience, if you make it to Switzerland, to Basel, then you should join our kickoff because we do awesome parties on the rooftop of the building. It’s quite fun! Also, we might have some news about closing our second fund that’s focused more on growth stage startups. and opening a joint venture somewhere in North America. So we are still expanding our activities quite rapidly. We are also doubling the team by the end of April. And so, in a way, we still feel like it’s the beginning. And it’s quite exciting.

Veronica Combs: Well, I’m not sure how much travel budget I have this year, but I would love to be there to hear all the pitches and there’s so much energy and optimism at those events, connecting the investors and the people with the great ideas. I was looking at your initial class and you have a real range of. entrepreneurial adventures. Can you tell us about one of them and their journey so far? 

Anca Albu: Yes, we had five projects to begin with. Four of them graduated the five-month program that we have and they are quite diverse. Some people would disagree with me because it’s been around for quite some time, but actually building entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial ventures with quantum, is quite new. So we have a global focus. We look at the startups all over the world, except China. And we select what we think are the ones that have the most chances of success.

Moonlight AI was our wildcard because they are doing AI for cancer detection. It wasn’t necessarily quantum, but during their participation in our program, they worked with our partner, Quantum Basel. And with the Quantum Basel scientists, and they worked on a project of potentially incorporating quantum into what they do.

Accelerating the development of their AI and running quantum computers, it’s like a boost, right? That was a very interesting project. It’s still running, but so far it has been quite successful. Other projects were Anacore from Germany, and they have this global platform for supporting quantum and connecting quantum from various areas. They have a platform, it’s called Planck. And, Kipu Quantum, which they are quite known, they pitched also in the U.S. at the Quantum World Congress. And they are doing quite well, they are also from different countries, the founding team. They do error correction. On a software level. I’m not a quantum physicist, I’m not a scientist, but I understand what they are trying to achieve with their technology. And I think this is the most valuable thing that us as a team can do is to get trained and we can learn. Like I’ve read so much about quantum in the past year and I love it. I absolutely love it. 

Veronica Combs: Right. Your work history is so interesting because I know you’ve worked in technology a long time and built other communities around startups and founders and investors.

But like you said, quantum is a little different. How do you find explaining it? To investors or people who are interested, but like us don’t have degrees in physics or PhDs or years of research work.

Anca Albu: It’s not always that easy. And I noticed now being for quite a while going to various events all over the world, from the US to European ones.

The first reaction of the majority of people that are not aware of where quantum technologies is, they push back, right? It’s out there. We don’t know anything about it. And I’ve actually been in Cannes last week and there was an event there that the target audience was private, market investors, and there was no mention of quantum.

There was only another quantum investor there from France, Quantonation. But I tried to gauge where the market is at and how they think about potentially starting to invest in quantum. The reactions are quite interesting because  the first thing like, I know nothing about quantum. 

But you should learn, right? We can help, we can make connections. They get curious, but the fact that they don’t really know what it is, to me, it’s a sign that it will take quite a long time to make a larger audience from the general public aware of the potential of quantum technologies. How I explain it, of course, I try to be the least scientific as possible and really just explain the difference between bits and qubits. And the potential that comes with this difference. And I think that relating to quantum computing is the easiest thing for the majority of people because everybody is using a laptop or a computer.

Then if you go into photons and get carried away and start talking about cold atoms and all this, then I lose them for sure. Really keep it simple, keep it focused on something that they can relate to. And then it sparks their interest a little bit. I think it’s also important to outline to them the potential use cases. I think use cases are a very good way of making them understand what is possible with quantum or what we hope is possible with quantum. 

Veronica Combs: I’m curious about the flip side as well. I’ve written about startup companies for a long time. And it is so great to talk to someone who’s so passionate and they know so much and they’re ready to get out there, but they have their own communication challenges. You know, you can’t go too far into the weeds. Cause like you said, you’ll lose people.

What advice do you find yourself giving startups who are trying to explain their technology to potential investors?

Anca Albu:I think the most important advice and the most important learning for them is that they need to learn storytelling as soon as they figure out how to do storytelling and relate to something that’s familiar to the investors or the audience, because they will not always pitch to investors. They will also go to events or the general public. They’ll find a way to tell the story of what their technology is capable of and what problems they are potentially solving. And that will make it much easier to communicate what they’re doing.

 And I noticed, of course, a lot of the founders of these quantum companies are obviously scientists, right? A lot of them come from academia and there’s a divide between how they think and what they know and how they communicate – and the rest of the world. And I love the way that they think and how they communicate. But I also see that it confuses the rest of the world. 

And another thing that I noticed, I went to Quantum Responsibility in Quantum Industry, a workshop in Karlsruhe, Germany, last year. And there were, of course, scientists there and a few founders, not that many. And I noticed that there is this tendency of the quantum scientists to push back, like the general population doesn’t know. And what they’ve seen in the Ants movie, it’s ridiculous. And it’s just not possible at all.They get quite aggressive that the world doesn’t understand. But throughout my life, I’ve traveled to 54 countries. I worked in five different countries. I worked with a lot of different cultures and I’m passionate about communication.

When you say tree, and I say tree, you might be seeing an oak tree and I might be seeing an apple tree. It’s not the same definition, even if the word is the same. And I think that there’s this lack of understanding from both sides of how do you make a compromise to make sure that you actually understand what the other side is saying and explain your side in layman terms, in the case of the scientists, so that the general population understands. 

Yeah, the Ants movie obviously is ridiculous in terms of the quantum. And, there’s also another one, Foundation. I don’t know if you’ve seen it on Apple. They made a series based on Isaac Asimov’s books, Foundation. And I had to go and check with the Quantum Basel quantum team.

I’m not sure they got the quantum part right. Because in the books, there’s no quantum, but in the movie there is. Are they just playing on the hype or did they really do their research and understand how superposition works ? So there is some work to be done, but I also think that even in these ridiculous examples, it’s still sparks of curiosity.

And they get to go “Oh, this is cool. You know, I want to learn more about it.” And they actually learn what it is. And I think that’s valuable in itself, even though you start with some unrealistic scenario, but in the end, some people will be more exposed 

Veronica Combs: Right. I think you have to have a little bit of an imagination, a little bit of faith in the science and be willing to have a hypothesis and test it out. I think we’re so focused on instant gratification and next-day shipping that you have to, like you said, pull back a little bit and think about the big picture and what’s possible.

Anca Albu: I think effective communication is really essential to convey the transformative potential of quantum technology to the target audience and then learning how to tell the story about this and, learning how to refine the messaging when needed, it can really create more impact. 

Veronica Combs: I was reading through the values of  QAI Ventures and your manifesto includes champion the visionary and champion authenticity. I’m curious how you work with startups to put those values into practice.

Anca Albu: That’s very important to us, we know we champion authenticity by being authentic ourselves and we foster open dialogue and collaboration within our team and with our partners and also with our startups. We try to enable genuine innovation. And problem solving. And whenever we have a problem as a team, we always voice it out. Sometimes we get into heated discussions, but we are not afraid of opening up and just saying, I don’t know how to solve this problem. And this is really important. First of all, when you show vulnerability, then everybody else is much open towards showing it as well.

When we talk about the values that we have, we actively seek the visionary founders, and we actively look at the technologies in the quantum space and try to identify if it’s game changing.

We work with quantum scientists and we have them review the projects that apply to be in our accelerator. Whenever we do due diligence or whenever we evaluate a startup, we actually have quantum physicists that look at the technical aspect. 

Even if it’s a good team, if there’s no solid potential for the technology behind it, then we will know. And it was also a learning experience for us. The first batch, as I said in the beginning, we learned a lot from it. And now we are getting the quantum physicist much closer to us. We are also hiring someone in our team that is a quantum physicist. Of course, it’s not possible to have a hundred percent of them be that way. But at least we’re looking for that.

Veronica Combs: When you’re working with startups and trying to get investment, sometimes you have to have difficult conversations. Sometimes, like you said, an idea just doesn’t have the promise that maybe the founder hoped it did. Is that something that’s a skill on your team? 

Anca Albu: We always try to give feedback, right? When we don’t accept the startups in accelerator, we encourage the team to give them feedback. And this is something that I learned from experience, right? Even the last role that I had before this one, I helped build the largest and most active angel investor network in Switzerland. And we had hundreds of pitches a year, like hundreds of founders looking for investment.

And I don’t think it’s fair to reject them without telling them why. I think that founders in general are very open to learning and improving, right? It comes with the entrepreneurial personality. What can I do better? And what can I learn? And if you don’t provide feedback, then it’s not really helpful.

Veronica Combs: I imagine the mentor element of the accelerator is so valuable to founders. I mean, you’re sitting there by yourself late at night thinking, how am I going to solve this problem? Do you provide mentors to help answer those questions? 

Anca Albu:  Yes, we do. It’s not always easy to find the right mentors and, of course, the quantum flavor of building a business is new. So we split the profiles of the mentors, and then we have the quantum scientists that can work on the technical aspect. But then we have those individuals that have relevant industry experience.

For example, in the case of Moonlight, they do life science and pharma. People that understand how to build a life science startup, for example. So it takes transferable knowledge or transferable skills, as they say.

So you can take those from life science and integrate some of them into the quantum approach of building a business. We always look for mentors that have a passion for mentoring. They have to be helpful and not demotivating. I had quite a few arguments in my past with unhelpful mentors.

It’s very difficult to be an entrepreneur. It takes a lot of courage. And then motivation is a big driver in what they do. And if you have someone that has. experience and tell them, “oh no, this is just not going to work”, you’re not being helpful. It’s good to give constructive feedback, that’s what you’re here for. Not to tell them that it’s not going to work. Everybody knows it might not work. So yeah, we find those people with the right mentality, and they bring the expertise and the guidance. 

Also, another important aspect is the connection to the industry. So they can make the proper introductions potentially to a corporate or someone that the startup can work on to validate their technology or build a use case. So we’re building a network around the mentors and around the startups. And this defines us more as an organization, that being an accelerator and a VC we are an ecosystem builder. 

Veronica Combs: So Anca, you mentioned that a lot of quantum founders come from academia. How does QAI Ventures work with universities for mentoring and other support for your programs?

Anca Albu: We have professors from the University of Basel, from ETH in Zurich, from University in Lausanne.. We attract this academia to look at the technology and potentially give feedback on that as well. And another cool thing is that with the University of Baden, now we have an understanding that they will look at the startups that join our program, and they will select those that they want to go and work in their laboratory. We also are closely connected to the University of Strasbourg.

Veronica Combs: I think that behind the scenes deliberate community building  is overlooked a lot, but it’s so important. It just doesn’t happen, Otherwise. So, thank you for doing that for the industry. It’s very important. 

Anca Albu: Of course. Yeah, we are building an alumni program. We are going to have the founders that are graduating from our accelerator or the founders that get funding from our VC fund, because they’re two different things, right? So a startup can accelerate and receive 200,000 francs, or they can receive VC money that comes from the actual fund it gets to.

And so we’re now with QAI Entangled, which makes sense. We try to build this community of founders that have gone through certain pains, you know, trials and tribulations, and that they can share their experience with others. And of course, we are going to also open this to more experienced founders from already successful Quantum companies, like Strangeworks and Quera.

Veronica Combs: Right. We talk to a lot of different people, here at the podcast and at the agency. Is there a gap in the ecosystem or any help that we can get out there and say, “Hey, do more of this or less of this or volunteer your time?”

Anca Albu: There is a gap, first of all, in communication. So I think that what you guys are doing is very important, translating between the two, is like The scientists are speaking German and the business is speaking French and then the general audience is speaking Chinese and then the government is, who knows what language they’re speaking these days?

But translating between all of these languages is something that is missing right now. Bridging the knowledge gap, between the general public and quantum experts, which is very important and is being done with movies or other creative things. 

We also see a lot of potential in expanding the educational initiatives and outreach efforts to make quantum technology more accessible to a broader audience. So I think that having quantum accessible in the cloud is also a very useful strategy.

And Quantum Basel has partnerships with IBM and IonQ and D Wave. So we provide this access to hardware to the startups so that they can test their technologies. Then in the future, there’s room for further collaboration between quantum startups and established industry players, to accelerate the quantum adoption across various sections. We are in Basel, which is a huge pharma city. We have Novartis and Roche headquartered here, you know, so having these corporations understand the need for quantum and, even if some of their programs haven’t moved forward in the past, it takes a different approach for sure.

Veronica Combs: I know your work is focused on the Accelerator and the VC fund, but QAI Ventures is part of a larger vision for a better future. Tell us about that.

Anca Albu: Our project is born out of a bigger initiative. Initiated by an investor born and raised in Basel, he wanted to create something that would be useful in the future, 20, 30, 50 years from now to have our grandkids live a good life. So of course, technology is a big one. Sustainability is another big one. Diversity is another big one. What they did is they invested more than 500 million francs in buying this property and now they are rebuilding everything and the building where we are in now and where we will have the awesome party on April 8th.

It’s 100 percent sustainable, and we also produce the energy that we can give to three neighboring villages. So it’s all thought out. We have the architects, they have our sustainability experts on their team, that whenever they start building, they look at everything that is involved, from cement to the plants on the roof and everything.

So we have a small ecosystem here that we’re trying to project into the world. Like we really want to build a sustainable, diverse, and much healthier future than what it looks like right now. If you read the news, it’s all doomsday, but we believe, and we have hope that it will be better.

And we’re actually actively trying to build that future. So yeah, and we also have IonQ that is moving on site and they’re going to have a quantum computer in the building. We have the D Wave European HQ that is moving, they’re relocating to be here. So it’s going to be a quantum hub. 

Veronica Combs:  Well, thanks for all your time, Anca. We’ll definitely be watching out for the next class of startups, April 8^th. We’ll post your contact information in the show notes. So anyone who wants to follow up, can. Thanks so much. 

Anca Albu: Thank you very much. 

Host Veronica Combs is a quantum tech editor, writer and PR professional. She manages public relations for quantum computing and tech clients as an account manager with HKA Marketing Communications, the #1 agency in quantum tech PR. You can find them on X, formerly known as Twitter, @HKA_PR. Veronica joined HKA from TechRepublic, where she was a senior writer. She has covered technology, healthcare and business strategy for more than 10 years. If you’d like to be on the podcast yourself, you can reach her on LinkedIn, Veronica Combs, or you can go to the HKA website and share your suggestion via the Contact Us page.

March 6, 2024