Quantum Companies, Quantum People

SQC Adds Cadence Veteran to Lead Legal, Governance Scaling

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July 6, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Silicon Quantum Computing is expanding its leadership team with the appointment of Karna Nisewaner as Chief Legal Officer, effective June 1, 2026, a move indicating planned scaling in advance of milestones for the company’s universal, commercial-scale quantum computers. Nisewaner brings over 25 years of experience in the semiconductor and AI industries, most recently serving as General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at Cadence Design Systems for 14 years. Based in Palo Alto, California, she will lead SQC’s legal and governance functions, establishing a presence in a major tech hub despite the company’s founding in Sydney, Australia. Founder and CEO Michelle Simmons said, “World-class talent and industry leaders have a home at SQC.”

Nisewaner Appointed Chief Legal Officer at Silicon Quantum Computing

Karna Nisewaner’s arrival at Silicon Quantum Computing as Chief Legal Officer on June 1, 2026, signals an expansion of the company’s governance structure ahead of anticipated growth in the quantum computing sector. Nisewaner brings to SQC a 25-year career specializing in legal strategy within the semiconductor and artificial intelligence industries, a background that positions her to address the challenges of scaling a complex, global technology firm. The appointment reflects SQC’s commitment to establishing a presence in Palo Alto, California, despite its founding and headquarters remaining in Sydney, Australia; this expansion aims to attract talent and leverage the resources of a key technology hub. Nisewaner stated, “I have dedicated my career to helping technology companies scale with the discipline and rigor that complex, global environments demand,” highlighting her experience in managing the legal complexities of rapidly growing businesses.

This move follows recent investments from both Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation and Firgun Ventures, alongside SQC’s selection for Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, indicating sustained momentum for the company as it progresses toward its goal of delivering a commercial-scale quantum system by 2033. With in-house quantum processing unit manufacturing and weekly chip iterations, SQC is actively deploying quantum-enhanced AI and simulation systems to enterprise customers, and Nisewaner’s legal expertise will be crucial in supporting this continued innovation and commercialization.

SQC holds a singular advantage: exclusive capability to manufacture silicon chips with atomic precision, enabling quantum machine learning chips and quantum computing systems with world-leading algorithmic fidelity.

Silicon Quantum Computing

Her presence in Palo Alto, California, demonstrates SQC’s expansion beyond its Sydney, Australia headquarters, establishing a foothold in a critical technology hub despite its origins. SQC’s advantage lies in its proprietary atomic-precision manufacturing capabilities, allowing for weekly iteration of new quantum processing unit chips and deployment of quantum machine learning systems to enterprise customers.

I have dedicated my career to helping technology companies scale with the discipline and rigor that complex, global environments demand.

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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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