Descriptions:
A Bloomberg Technology roundtable brings together three CEOs from leading European quantum computing companies to assess where the technology stands and when commercial impact will arrive. Carmen Palacios-Berraquero of New Quantum (raised $60M Series A), Ashley Montanaro of Phasecraft (raised $50M+, works with Google and IBM), and Steve Brierley of Rivlane (raised $75M Series C in 2024) represent distinct layers of the quantum stack — networking infrastructure, algorithm development, and error correction respectively — offering a multi-angle picture of the field.
All three agree 2025 marked a genuine inflection point, with investment into quantum up 50% year-over-year and qubit quality reaching levels that make error correction viable in principle. The central remaining challenge is scale: current quantum hardware can execute roughly 1,000 operations before errors overwhelm computation, while large-scale commercial applications will require trillions of error-free operations. Rivlane’s work on real-time quantum error correction — framed as an inference problem running on top of physical qubits — is presented as the critical bridge between current hardware and practical utility.
Timelines for real-world commercial impact cluster around the late 2020s to early 2030s, with drug discovery and materials science expected as earliest beneficiaries. The panel also discusses hardware-agnostic networking strategies, the merits of competing qubit architectures (superconducting, trapped-ion, neutral atom), and the growing integration between quantum processors and Nvidia GPUs in hybrid computing workflows.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Technology · Published February 15, 2026
🏷️ Format: Deep Dive
