Readers’ Choice in the Promising Startups Ranking: The Quantum Computing Company from Ness Ziona
Quantum Source, which is developing a quantum computer based on a combination of photons and cold atoms and is led by a team that includes a former Weizmann Institute scientist and serial chip entrepreneurs, is the winner of the “Readers’ Choice” category in Globes’ 2026 Promising Startups ranking. Hoopo came in second with a system for managing maritime logistics supply chains through identification of industrial equipment without using GPS, and in third place was the fintech company April, which developed AI-based systems for filing annual tax reports in the United States. ● TECH-IL conference: unveiling Globes’ Promising Startups ranking ● New report: hundreds of employees leave Intel, and Nvidia is the biggest beneficiary ● The company on the way to a $2.7 billion exit, and the Israeli connection
In the poll, which included 30 fast-growing startups, about 3,500 Globes website users responded over the past week. Other companies included in it were AirEV, the eVTOL manufacturer from Pardes Hanna; the security startup Kela, which is growing within Israel’s borders; the AI agent management company Wonderful; and the Israeli company Factify from Jerusalem, which wants to replace PDF documents. Another nominee in the readers’ choice category also came from the quantum computing field, Quantum Art, which developed an end-to-end quantum computer based on trapped ions and also uses atoms.
The readers’ choice is held alongside Globes’ ranking of the 10 most promising startups, which will be published for the 20th time next Wednesday, June 17, at the TECH IL conference. The conference, which will host senior figures such as Wiz cofounder Ami Luttwak, Shlomo Kramer, Liad Agmon, Michal Braverman-Blumenstyk, Hamutal Meridor, Eyal Freund of ESOP and Hila Zigman, will focus on hot trends in the technology industry, foreign-exchange challenges, major cyber exits and the boom in defense tech.
Breakthrough solution
Quantum Source, located on the other side of the street from the competing candidate in the Science Park in Ness Ziona, was founded by Prof. Barak Dayan, a renowned physicist from the Weizmann Institute. He operated one of the institute’s two photonic quantum labs after returning from a postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech and training with leading scientists in the field.
Dayan sought to develop a quantum computer, a machine that harnesses the special physical properties of light particles for quantum calculation, which may be faster than the most powerful supercomputers available today, based on quantum mechanics. But he was frustrated by one of the worst characteristics of photons, the rays do not interact with one another, making it very difficult to build a computer from them. The solution he found was the ability to use atoms to bind photons together in order to create “logic gates,” the way light beams are arranged to produce different computing operations.
He founded Quantum Source after serving as an expert on a task for Pitango Ventures, reviewing its investment in another photonic quantum company, the Australian PsiQuantum, which became known for photonic quantum supercomputers the size of a football field. “I told our friends at PsiQuantum about the idea of harnessing light beams to one another through an atom, and their scientists admitted to me that no one had this technology before us,” Dayan tells Globes.
Dayan founded the company with three of Israel’s leading computing entrepreneurs, CEO Oded Melmed, who founded Altair Semiconductor and sold it to Sony about a decade ago for $212 million, Sony recently decided to sell Altair’s operations, R&D VP Gil Samu, formerly a member of the management team at Anobit, Apple’s first acquisition in Israel and a former vice president of hardware there, and chairman Dan Harash, former CEO of chip company Provigent, which was sold to Broadcom last decade.
Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett joined the group in May 2023 as a director. In the past, he was CEO of fintech company Cyota, which was sold to RSA, and an investor in software company Soluto, which was sold to Asurion.
Particles that can be in two places at once
Quantum computers already exist today, but they cannot be used meaningfully at scale, certainly not to replace Nvidia’s efficient supercomputers. The difficulty lies in the challenge these computers are designed to solve, harnessing the nontrivial property of microscopic particles such as ions, atomic particles or photons that create light waves for extremely powerful computing.
According to quantum theory, formulated about a hundred years ago, very small particles such as light waves or ions can exist in two places at once. Intuitively, this is hard to understand, because it is not a characteristic of large objects, but below the molecular level it is a scientifically proven phenomenon, and companies developing quantum computers already point to its existence. Imagine a spinning coin, if you stop it, it will show only one side, heads or tails, but while spinning it shows both sides at once.
Particles that can exist in several places at once may revolutionize the way computers have worked since the last century. Instead of processing information based on a changing electrical current that distinguishes between zero and one, it is possible to access the full range of possibilities between zero and one by exploiting the ability of an ion or photon to behave simultaneously as zero and one, or even as any number on the spectrum between zero and one.
Such a particle, representing several numbers at the same time, is called a qubit, the smallest processing unit in a quantum computer, analogous to a bit in a classical computer. Because a qubit represents several numbers at once, it can perform far more calculations than a regular bit, and instead of doing so serially, one after another, as a regular computer works, a quantum computer will be able to process all of this information in parallel, at the same moment.
That is why the development of a new drug molecule could be shortened from years to minutes, through a virtual experiment conducted inside the computer, which would calculate all the possibilities for the molecule’s viability and the reactions it would create with other molecules in parallel.
Unlike the classical computer, built on electronic circuits integrated with semiconductors, quantum computing is still in its infancy, with several competing technologies racing from different directions toward “quantum advantage,” the moment when a quantum computer will be stronger than Nvidia’s most powerful supercomputer.
While the most mature technologies on the market today come from superconductors, as in IBM and Google’s quantum chips, or from trapped ions, as in the computers of Quantinuum and IonQ, photonic quantum computing has remained in the shadows, with one dominant company, the Australian PsiQuantum. PsiQuantum raised $1 billion at the end of last year, at a valuation of $7 billion, to build two photonic supercomputers, each the size of a manufacturing plant, one in Australia and the other near Chicago.
A hybrid quantum computer the size of a server
Prof. Dayan joined forces with former Altair CEO Oded Melmed, and following feedback from the Australian company, they decided to embark on a long road of feasibility testing. “We set out on three years of calculations, we did not rush straight to investors,” Dayan says.
At Quantum Source, they believe they will be able to create a functioning quantum computer with millions of qubits, no larger than a standard Nvidia or AMD server cabinet, one that could eventually be placed in data centers, unlike PsiQuantum’s maximalist approach, which says the only way to do this is with computers the size of stadiums.
The major challenge facing photonic quantum companies concerns how to harness light beams together to produce a logic gate, that is, the basic information that light beams will represent in the quantum calculation later on, whether the beams represent 0 or 1, or 0.5, for example.
While PsiQuantum sends photons through tubes many meters long to increase the chance of interaction between them, the Israeli company speeds up the coupling of two photons by confining frozen atoms in special vacuum tubes, which in turn bind two photons on a standard photonic chip commonly used in the industry.
Prof. Dayan calls his quantum computer “hybrid,” combining the advantages of photons and atoms. “The efficiency of generating a photon is low and coupling it with other photons is extremely low, that is why, for example, PsiQuantum reaches an efficiency of one in a million. To accelerate and improve this process, we use atoms, but you do not need more than a few hundred of them to bind an infinite number of photons and create millions of qubits, and from there the road to building a powerful computer is open.”
Dayan says that optical fiber, a cheap and common tool, can be used to translate many elements from the classical computing world into quantum computing. Wrapping a fiber and trapping photons in it to delay their arrival at the processing chip can effectively create a memory component, similar to a classical computer, and by creating loops and windings it is possible to build an architecture for a powerful computer that can more easily contain millions of qubits using the same coupling and memory components.
Unlike the rest of the quantum companies, Quantum Source has not yet launched a quantum processor. Dayan believes that even companies that have launched quantum processors have not been able to prove sufficient computing capability at a high number of qubits.
When will quantum computing reach the point where it can surpass today’s standard supercomputers in computing power? According to experts, this point in time, known as “quantum advantage,” is expected by the end of the decade, but Dayan takes a more pessimistic view. “No one is five or six years away from achieving this advantage, the question is when the first player will reach computation based on millions of qubits. I think we will get there within the next eight years. And while other companies may get there before us with factory-sized computers, we will be able to do it shortly afterward with server-sized computers.”
Quantum Source, founded in 2021, has raised only $77 million so far from investors including Pitango of Chemi Peres, Grove of Dov Moran, Eclipse of Lior Susan, and DTC of Michael Dell. Other investors include 10D, Standard Investments, Cannon and Level. The company employs nearly 70 people in Ness Ziona, including 30 PhD holders and five professors.
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