Quantum Computing Business News, Quantum Ecosystem

QAI Ventures accelerator graduates seven quantum founders

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September 23, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Seven founders graduated from the 2026 QAI Ventures accelerator cohort at the Quantum Global Summit, signaling growing momentum in the quantum startup space as established companies grapple with strategy. Many now have a quantum position before they have a quantum programme, a gap highlighted by Carlos Kuchkovsky, CEO and Co-Founder of QCentroid, who argued the starting point should be “a KPI the organisation already reports on.” QCentroid itself was an accelerator participant two years ago and now provides the platform for QAI Ventures’ industry sandboxes, enabling organizations to test quantum applications within their own contexts.

QCentroid’s Accelerator Journey & Industry Sandbox Platform

QCentroid now powers the industry sandboxes used by QAI Ventures, a rapid evolution for the company that participated in the accelerator program just two years prior. This transition from startup to industry enabler demonstrates the accelerating pace of development within the quantum ecosystem, allowing companies to quickly move from receiving investment to facilitating exploration for others. The sandboxes offer organizations a dedicated environment to test sector-specific quantum use cases, moving beyond theoretical positioning toward practical application and evidence-based roadmaps.

Kuchkovsky advocated for beginning with a pragmatic starting point for identifying potential quantum applications, prioritizing demonstrating business relevance and securing continued funding, acknowledging that a clear path to value is essential for long-term success. He explained that while technical requirements vary across industries, the core process of identifying solvable problems, evaluating current solutions, and building evidence of quantum value remains consistent.

The QAI Ventures accelerator program culminated with the graduation of seven founders at the summit, signaling a growing output of quantum startups. This cohort’s journey mirrors QCentroid’s own recent experience, highlighting the program’s effectiveness in nurturing early-stage companies.

Romi Sumaria, Chief Commercial Officer at QAI Ventures, and Adrian Glatz, Partner at KPMG, joined Kuchkovsky in discussing the challenges and opportunities of building a robust quantum strategy. The firm’s recent launch of a Singapore hub with SoftBank, alongside a $300K investment across four deep-tech startups via its Singapore Quantum Accelerator, as reported on 2026-07-10, underscores its commitment to fostering quantum-classical hybrid computing applications for industry.

QAI Ventures’ embedded presence within the Basel quantum ecosystem, near the Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH, further strengthens its position as a central player in the field. According to Kuchkovsky, quantum readiness isn’t about possessing all the answers, but rather about cultivating the ability to discover them, a philosophy now embedded within the structure of the QAI Ventures sandboxes. He stated that finding answers is key to realizing the potential of quantum technology for real-world impact.

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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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