Podcast with Zach Yerushalmi, CEO of Elevate Quantum and leader of the U.S. Quantum Tech Hub

Transcript

Yuval Boger: Hello, Zach, and thank you for joining me today.

Zach Yerushalmi: Hi, Yuval. It’s a huge pleasure being here.

Yuval: Who are you and what do you do?

Zach: I’m the chief executive of Elevate Quantum. With an incredible team and a consortium of some of the leading players in quantum, including QuEra, we run the U.S. Quantum Tech Hub. We’re the first and only major place-based investment the government has made in the quantum industry.

That place-based lens focuses disproportionately on Colorado and New Mexico. Technically, Wyoming is in the catchment as well, though it is a smaller ecosystem. I focus my time and energy, together with the team, on dramatically accelerating the commercialization of quantum. I feel you and i are pot committed, but it’s certainly an industry I’m pretty excited about it.

Yuval: How long has this been going on from when you started Elevate Quantum until today?

Zach: Three years. It stands on the shoulders of the Mountain West ecosystem, which has been doing this work for about 80 years. There was a lot of soft connectivity already, but we formalized it, inspired by the CHIPS Act and the funding streams that came together to support place-based strategies to accelerate industry and R&D roadmaps.

Yuval: Let’s assume I wanted to open another hub just like Elevate, but in a different state. Let’s assume you wanted to help me, and there wasn’t a finite pie of money in the U.S. that needed to be distributed between them.

Zach: We can always print it.

Yuval: We can always print more money.

What have you learned? What should this new hypothetical hub do, and what should it not do?

Zach: It’s a good question. You represent an incredibly important U.S. stakeholder in this, so your perspective is valuable. I’ll put something out there as a discussion, and I’m curious for your reaction.

Looking back historically, there are two points. First, we both recognize that quantum is very important. Historically, U.S. industrial strategy hasn’t faced stakes this high in about 70 years. As a country, we could rest on decades of scientific advancement and capability, and if we got some policy decisions wrong, the consequence was usually limited to lost money while retaining competitive advantage.

We are in a different age with quantum. Because of its newness, our competitive advantage over China is much smaller. The stakes are extremely high, and we need to get industrial strategy and the organizations that implement it right.

Looking at semiconductors, which I think is the best analogy, leading ecosystems that actually manufacture technology tend to have three traits. Industry is front and center because it provides capital efficiency and the ability to scale. Examples include Northern Europe with ASML, Korea, Taiwan, and China, all of which have industry champions.

They also have a research ecosystem that quietly powers the next evolution of the technology.

Finally, and this is something the U.S. historically emphasized less, they focus on public–private partnerships that address very specific market failures. These are areas that fall between the stools: research institutions like national labs aren’t well positioned to address them, and industry cannot because they are literal market failures.

From a practical perspective, that means being ruthless about defining swim lanes. What is industry best positioned to do? What research builds on that? And which market failures need to be addressed beyond those two? These ecosystems rarely emerge from nothing; they stand on the shoulders of existing industries.

A useful reference is The Social History of the Machine Gun, recommended by Jordan Schneider. It shows how that technology stood on the shoulders of the machine-tools industry. This cascade happens repeatedly.

That ruthless lens matters because this is a critical moment for quantum, and we cannot afford missteps.

Yuval: How do you think about guaranteeing demand? When the semiconductor industry started in the U.S., the government essentially said, “We’re going to buy your product.” Not just fund development or factories, but guarantee demand. Is that applicable here?

Zach: Yes. I’m a strong proponent of advanced market commitments, which are slightly different from offtake agreements. Joe Broz at IBM, who lef QED-C, has been a major driver of this approach.

My mental model for quantum computing, as opposed to sensing, is biotech. With semiconductors, transistors were already useful; they went into rockets and delivered real capabilities. With quantum computers, we are not there yet.

To create an efficient market structure, acquisitions need to happen years before the technology is useful. What we need now is the precursor to a useful quantum transistor being acquired for hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars.

The biotech industry does this routinely. Companies are acquired for billions of dollars a decade before a drug is licensed, scaled, and used clinically. The model already exists; we just need to reinforce it for quantum.

Yuval: What have you learned about how governments evaluate quantum proposals?

Zach: The QuEra team, with their academic background, has applied for many grants, so I would defer to you guys. My observation is that grant development is similar to product development. You must be acutely aware of what the customer wants.

In government, that customer can be amorphous or consist of a diverse set of stakeholders. Nevertheless, understanding those needs and delivering against them is essential.

With the Tech Hubs program, as contrasted with NSF Engines, the emphasis was on higher-TRL technology. That required ruthless prioritization. We had many important quantum computing stakeholders, but quantum computers were not yet at the TRL stage the Tech Hub team was seeking.

We made the case that focusing on sensing and enabling components would address an interesting and useful market on its own, while also cascading into innovation in quantum computing. That argument resonated with the evaluators.

Yuval: How do you distribute the money? How do you decide which projects to fund now that you have a budget?

Zach: We followed a process similar to product development: identifying what was needed, how much it would cost, and how that mapped to ecosystem needs.

There were difficult conversations. Quantum computing stakeholders need and deserve support, but direct funding of a quantum computer was not a good fit for the Tech Hub program at that time.

At the other extreme, some things are unquestionably important, such as a professionally run superconducting fab in the U.S. that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. That scale was far beyond the first-round Tech Hub budget.

We therefore focused on technology services. My background is science commercialization in photonics, and the most effective public–private model I’ve seen is a high-mix, low-volume fab modeled after IMEC. We asked what it would take to build an IMEC for the quantum era within the available budget.

We do have a fab, focused on photonic integrated circuits. Because photons are involved, there is greater emphasis on packaging, shared-use equipment, and other technical services.

Yuval: What does success look like when you think about getting additional funding in the future?

Zach: This is challenging, because industrial policy can fail if it is captured by special interests. That risk is why the U.S. historically developed an aversion to it.

The North Star has two components. First, do you have the most capable companies with the most advanced technology at a given point in time? Second is cycle time: how long it takes to go from an idea to a widget to testing it in a relevant environment.

Given how early quantum is, cycle time is an early indicator of whether you are heading in the right direction. My metric of success is whether we are addressing true market failures and doing so with leading cycle time.

Yuval: If you look outside the U.S. at tech hubs in Europe or Asia, what would you like to import?

Zach: There is what we would like to import, and then there is the political economy of how to do it. Other countries do not have national labs in the same way the U.S. does, so adaptation is required.

One thing I would import is the hunger of the Israeli ecosystem. It is distinctive and extends deeply into the startup community. The work of the IQCC there is excellent.

Another is thoughtful public–private partnerships addressing market failures, such as IMEC. Every leading ecosystem that manufactures technology has a high-mix, low-volume fab adjacent to an industry giant. Samsung has KAIST, ASML has IMEC, and Korea has similar structures next to TSMC. This pattern is not accidental.

Yuval: Within the U.S., how would you compare Elevate Quantum with Chicago, Florida, Massachusetts, and other hubs?

Zach: There are ecosystems, and there are organizations that sit atop them. Colorado, for historical reasons, is the largest industry-focused quantum ecosystem in the U.S., with about 3,500 people. New York and Silicon Valley are close behind. Maryland has about 1,000 people, and Chicago has about 50.

The Mountain West and ecosystems on the coast operate at least 20 to 50 times the scale in terms of people than other ecosystems in the U.S. and fundraising can differ by 50 to 100 times. Specifically for the Mountain West, and for Elevate Quantum, we’re an industry-led ecosystem, and our North Star is ruthlessly focused on accelerating commercial roadmaps.

Yuval: Do you think there are too many hubs?

Zach: Historically, ecosystems concentrate according to a power law. In biotech, Boston accounts for about 50% of global spending.

My concern is not where leadership emerges within the U.S., but whether it emerges in America or China. If China develops quantum computing capabilities, they will not share them. It will remain a sovereign capability.

The U.S. has a lead, but with fault-tolerance systems yet to be developed, that lead is definitionally smaller than in past technology waves, and the consequences of getting this wrong are unlike anything we’ve seen in 70 years.

Yuval: As we get closer to the end, what kind of help do you need, and from whom?

Zach: Demand signals are critical. I want to give a particular shout-out to the QuEra team, and to  Nate, Misha and our other industry partners in particular. We need thoughtful discussion about which demand signals should be company-specific and which should be shared.

From federal stakeholders, we need help prioritizing limited resources. Picking winners at this stage is difficult, but not picking winners is also a strategy, and probably not a good one. Independent stakeholders can help identify the obvious, high-impact areas where we should double down.

Yuval: Last hypothetical: if you could have dinner with one of the quantum greats, dead or alive, who would it be?

Zach: From a science commercialization perspective, I would choose someone from the semiconductor revolution. Understanding both the eureka moment and the indicators that tell you when to commercialize is extremely difficult.

Someone like Shockley, despite being a challenging personality, would be fascinating. The transistor and band-gap phenomena are quantum phenomena, so I think that counts.

Yuval: Zach, thank you so much for joining me today.

Zach: Cheers.

January 22, 2026