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Quandela Develops to DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative Stage A

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June 17, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Quandela has been selected by the U. S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to advance to Stage A of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, a program designed to rigorously evaluate the feasibility of practical, utility-scale quantum computers. This next phase requires Quandela to deliver a detailed concept and supporting technical evidence for a quantum computer where computational value exceeds its cost, a key metric within the DARPA framework. The company’s architecture uniquely combines photons with semiconductor spin-based technologies, aiming to leverage the strengths of both approaches for scalable, high-performance systems. “Selection for Stage A of the QBI program reflects the progress and maturity of our approach,” said Yoni Elmalem, General Manager of Quandela Federal, highlighting the growing relevance of this hybrid technology for fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Quandela Selected for DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative Stage A

This selection signals a shift within the QBI program from purely theoretical exploration toward demanding concrete plans for near-term feasibility, requiring Quandela to present a detailed concept for a fault-tolerant quantum computer alongside supporting technical evidence. The initiative aims to provide the U. S. government with a clearer understanding of which quantum technologies can realistically scale and deliver practical benefits, moving beyond incremental improvements to focus on demonstrable value. This architecture seeks to capitalize on the connectivity and modularity of photons while incorporating the speed and resource efficiency of spin-based logic, a strategy not universally adopted within the quantum computing field.

Niccolo Somaschi, CEO of Quandela, emphasized the alignment between the QBI program’s evaluation criteria and the company’s engineering methodology, stating, “QBI establishes a structured framework for evaluating quantum computing approaches against clear performance and scalability criteria.” Successful completion of Stage A could allow Quandela to advance to subsequent phases of the QBI, which will focus on research and development planning, risk mitigation, and independent validation of system performance; the company currently offers energy-efficient quantum computers for data centers and cloud-accessible full-stack quantum computing solutions, demonstrating a commitment to translating research into practical applications.

It highlights the growing relevance of photonic and spin-photon hybrid architectures in addressing the requirements for scalable, fault-tolerant quantum systems.

Yoni Elmalem, General Manager of Quandela Federal
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Avatar of Ivy Delaney

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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