The Michael Biercuk-led Australian quantum outfit Q-CTRL has been on a flyer over the past year, and was last month named as one of Time Magazine’s 10 Most Influential New Frontier Companies in the world.
For Professor Biercuk, who has been building at Q-CTRL for more than eight years, the accolade was surreal. First, because he was handed the award at a Washington DC ballroom function by Salesforce founder and chief executive Marc Benioff, who is also Time’s owner. And secondly because Q-CTRL was on the list snuggled between IBM Quantum and SpaceX, which is undeniably good company to keep.
Michael Biercuk joins the Commercial Disco as a guest from Boston, just one stop on a long swing through the US meeting with customers, partners and staff.
This interview was conducted in the days leading up to the federal budget when speculation was rife about controversial changes to the Capital Gains Tax discount, and Professor Biercuk opens up about the impact these changes will have on local startups.
He is about the most articulate voice-of-reason on the proposed Capital Gains Tax changes that the startup sector has produced.
Q-CTRL has been a stand-out deep tech start up in this country, and it is no surprise that it is being heavily courted to move offshore.
The company’s logo has appeared three times on NASDAQ’s massive neon signage at New York’s Times Square and has been featured at the New York Stock Exchange (most recently last month) on its big screens.
Right now, the company is Australian-domiciled, and there are specific advantages to maintaining its headquarters here, as Professor Biercuk makes clear.
But those advantages are being tested, and as any Australian founder will tell you, running a company from this country is tough, with travel requirements alone bringing its own kind of pressures.
The Q-CTRL technology that is really driving momentum is its quantum navigation system, a product called Ironstone Opal that is designed for GPS-denied environments or as back-up for GPS enabled systems.
“When we got to understand more about how quantum sensing could be applied to navigation, we realised that it really plugged [a lot of market] gaps,” Professor Biercuk said.
“So instead of building a widget sensor and then trying to get someone to buy those sensors, we decided to build the whole navigation system.
“We conducted our own flight trial last year that we published in April and the results were quite extraordinary.”
The Ironstone Opal system as the quantum navigation system is known performed 100x better than the best high-end GPS back-up.
Those results were validated across different circumstances and different platform, building a robustness to the data that pointed directly to market potential.
“We came to understand that this was a very big opportunity, and we’ve pursued quite aggressively how these quantum navigation systems can be brought to market for commercial aviation, for defence, crewed aviation with pilots on board, and of course, for uncrewed [systems],” Professor Biercuk said.
The company has produced other variants for applications in maritime surface vehicles and sub-surface vehicles and land-based autonomous vehicles of different descriptions.
“We announced last year a commercial relationship with Airbus. We also have an acknowledged relationship with Lockheed Martin and a number of other major defence and aerospace players,” he said.
“We are keen to get this out as fast as we can, to as many platforms as we can.”
It is worth noting that all of the quantum sensing and quantum navigation technology development is done in Australia. The world leading tech is untouched by US ITAR regulation (International Traffic in Arms Regulation) – the strict export controls imposed by the US on strategic technology.
Having been developed outside of the US and being ITAR-free opens market opportunities for Q-CTRL. And being headquartered in AUKUS-partnered Australia gives the company close access in the US market.
For startups working on defence-related technologies, this interview is a good summation of the ITAR issues worth considering in relation to the advantages and disadvantages of being headquartered in Australia.
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