The Commercialization Challenge panel occurred during the Market Acceleration breakout track at Quantum World Congress 2024 featuring: Himadri Majumdar, CEO of SemiQon; Bill Shipman, Chief Technology Officer of Polaris Quantum Biotech; and Denis Mandich, Chief Technology Officer of Qrypt.

Himadri Majumdar is the co-founder and chief executive of SemiQon. SemiQon builds silicon-based quantum processors for the million-qubit era. Prior to co-founding SemiQon he was the Program Manager for Quantum Technologies at VTT. In his role he helped companies in quantum technology domain - especially fabless start-ups - to utilize VTT’s R&D expertise and infrastructure in quantum technologies. Himadri was also a founding member of the Finnish Quantum technologies ecosystem, InstituteQ, and led the business arm of the ecosystem, BusinessQ. Himadri successfully led a consortium and a 19M€ project of 20+ organizations from 10+ countries in Europe to build a European federated pilot-line for quantum technologies. He was also a Finnish member of the European Quantum Flagship coordination and support action (CSA). His ambition is to see SemiQon, and quantum technology in general, becoming a Finnish and global success story through cooperation and strategic partnerships. Himadri has 20 years of experience in innovation and innovation management and is also trained as an experimental physicist.

Bill Shipman, cofounder and CTO of PolarisQB is an accomplished leader who has been involved in several startups with prior experience in industry and translational research. Bill’s career of 16 years has been built upon successfully bridging the divide between interdisciplinary teams with high-impact problems and software developers to deliver results. For the last decade, Bill has been working in drug discovery, leveraging maturing and nascent technologies such as cloud, AI, and quantum computing to advance the industry. Most recently, Bill has led the team building PolarisQB’s Quantum Aided Drug Discovery (QuADD) platform, a transformative product enabling users to identify pre-clinical leads in days drawing from make-on-demand libraries contained with PolarisQB’s virtual library of 10^30 molecules. Notably, in late 2023 PolarisQB secured a DARPA IMPAQT award to extend methods for drug discovery to emerging quantum computing systems targeting commercial utility for next-generation systems with 10,000 qubits.

Denis Mandich, Qrypt CTO and co-founder, focuses on quantum security, R&D, post-quantum encryption (PQC) algorithms, and standards bodies. He holds several patents in cryptography, cyber technologies, and information processing. Denis is a founding member of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), a founding member of the NSF-funded Mid-Atlantic Quantum Alliance (MQA), an industry advisor to the first NSF-IUCRC-funded Center for Quantum Technologies (CQT), advisor to the Quantum Startup Foundry, Advisory Board of the AI Lab at Georgia College & State University, and former board member of quantum chip manufacturer Quside. Before joining Qrypt, Denis served 20 years in the US Intelligence Community, working on national security projects, cyber infrastructure, and advanced technology development. He has degrees in Physics from Rutgers University and speaks native-level Croatian and Russian. He publishes extensively on the quantum threat to national economic security.

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