MSU Research Foundation Podcast

Engineering the Future of Quantum Computing with EeroQ

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Season 1 Episode 8:

In this episode, we talk with Nick Farina and Dr. Johannes Pollanen of EeroQ, a quantum computing startup with roots at Michigan State University. Johannes is a physics professor at MSU and co-founder of the company, while Nick serves as EeroQ’s CEO. Together, they’re working on a unique approach to quantum computing that uses electrons floating on helium and connects with today’s chip-making technology.

We dive into how their system works, why they focused on making it scalable from the beginning, and what makes it different from other methods being explored. Nick and Johannes also share how the company got started, why they waited to raise venture capital, and the role MSU played in launching the effort.

Host: David Washburn
Guests: Nick Farina (CEO, EeroQ) and Dr. Johannes Pollanen (Cowan Professor of Physics at MSU and Co-founder, EeroQ)
Producers: Jenna McNamara and Doug Snitgen
Music: "Devil on Your Shoulder" by Will Harrison, licensed via Epidemic Sound

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David Washburn:

Welcome to the MSU Research Foundation podcast. Today I speak with Nick Farina and Johannes Palanin of EeroQ. We had a really fun conversation about quantum computing and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

David Washburn:

Today. My guests are Nick Farina and Johannes Palanin of EeroQ. EeroQ is a startup company that is building quantum computers. Professor Johannes Palanin is a Cowan Professor of Physics at Michigan State University and an entrepreneur, and Nick Farina is also an entrepreneur, an operator that serves as the CEO of EeroQ, and I'm excited to have you both here In full disclosure to the listeners,. the The MSU Research Foundation, through our captive venture funds, funds Red Cedar Ventures, is an investor in EeroQ, but nothing here should be taken as legal or investment advice. Welcome guys, Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having us, Dave.

Johannes Pollanen:

Yeah, thanks a lot.

David Washburn:

Well, let's start with your background. Let's start with you, Nick. Where are you from? How did you get involved in EeroQ?

Nick Farina:

Well, they actually are one and the same. So I'm originally from Chicago and I met Johannes in Chicago. I was on the board of his wife's theater company and when he was doing his PhD in Northwestern and I was running a software company at the time. And how I got an arrow cue was there was a longer period between meeting and the venture starting, but the meeting part was I was at a social gathering with Johannes and he told me what he was doing with electrons on helium, on helium, and I just thought, wow, you know, here I am, you know programming it, doing travel software all day, and this guy is, you know, manipulating matter at the coldest temperatures known to man, and that's just so much cooler than what I do. And I thought, you know, maybe you know one day that I could be a part of something that's interesting. Thank you.

David Washburn:

And interesting, with the software background, which I certainly appreciate. And and Johannes, phd, from Northwestern, I know that you did a postdoc at Caltech and you found your way to Michigan State. Tell us more.

Johannes Pollanen:

Yeah, so yeah, actually it was at Caltech where I really got steeped in in the quantum computing side of things. I'm a I'm a condensed matter experimentalist by training. That's what I did in my PhD. It was very much trying to understand the most fundamental aspects of nature at the quantum level. I remember, you know, being a PhD student and going to to holiday gatherings with my. I remember, you know, being a PhD student and going to holiday gatherings with my family and you know seeing relatives and them asking what are you up to? And having to say, you know, oh, I'm studying this very esoteric thing that, like 17 people in the world care about.

David Washburn:

And it wasn't until I got and Nick was one of them.

Johannes Pollanen:

And Nick was one of them.

David Washburn:

That's right, yeah, he was definitely one of them. Nick was one of them and Nick was one of them.

Johannes Pollanen:

That's right. Yeah, he was definitely one of them. And when I got to Caltech, I was a part of a cohort of postdocs and students that made up the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. It was one of the US's first and premier still is a premier center for quantum computing computing and Mark and I really realized at that point in time that we were at a stage in physics where we had the ability to, to you know, not just understand nature for its own sake, but to use that knowledge to, like, try to revolutionize computing. And it really, you know, people were studying all kinds of different aspects of computing, theory and experiment.

Johannes Pollanen:

And then, when I came to MSU as a faculty member, I was, you know, really racking my brain on where the directions that can push quantum computing forward and you know, this electron on helium system was one actually that originally was developed here at MSU oh wow, theoretically, by my colleague, Mark Dickman in the physics department oh wow, and I had designs to do this, and Mark said this is a great idea. We can, you know, you should push this forward and you know, as we'll probably get into, this system offers a lot of benefits. And we took off. And, you know, I never thought I'd be an entrepreneur.

Johannes Pollanen:

But, Nick, you know I am very open to opportunities and learning new things and trying to push the envelope and knowing Nick allowed that to happen.

David Washburn:

Well, it's interesting your time at Caltech. Did Feynman really kick all this stuff off?

Johannes Pollanen:

He did. That's Shannon Back in the 80s. I mean, he was the first one to, I mean one of the first people to really think about how you might simulate nature, nature using machines, quantum machines, yeah, but actually the ideas Neumann go back much further. Uh, to information science. Um, you know the Feynman first real uh, it's actually an interesting historical fact.

Johannes Pollanen:

Uh, information theory shannon developed classical information theory of entropy and these kinds of things where we made a deep connection between classical information and and um, uh and physics. But actually the quantum part happened first. Huh, it was done by von Neumann, oh interesting. Yeah, much earlier, and so it's. But yeah, Feynman really kicked off a lot of things to you know, we're at the stage where at that point we could actually manipulate and control matter. It was outside of theory.

Johannes Pollanen:

It was like we can. We can engineer and and control matter. It was outside of theory. It was like we can engineer and manipulate the quantum world in a way that makes it natural to think about trying to develop a technology.

Nick Farina:

Yeah, and that's a really interesting point for people listening, because a lot of times people assume that quantum computing was invented in 1985. And, as Johanna said, the roots actually go back much earlier.

David Washburn:

Well, so building a quantum computer is EeroQ and it's evolving and I'm sure it's not trivial. I think I've heard you all talk in the past of kind of seven or eight sort of really prominent methods to sort of, or architectures if you will, to construct quantum computers, and each of these approaches have strengths and trade-offs. And I think I've read that the best method depends really on the specific application that you have in mind. So your architecture is different. Can you talk a little bit? You both have mentioned it before. I think you've talked about electrons and helium and also the integration with sort of existing chipsets and chip architectures, which I think separates it from how others . are Now, on.

Johannes Pollanen:

Yeah, so the quantum computing architecture that ArrowQ is developing is one in which we trap electrons in vacuum above the surface of a control chip. That chip is covered with a layer of superfluid helium that protects like, let's from all of the noise sources and decoherence mechanisms that are on the chip. In some sense, an electron floating in vacuum is as pristine a quantum system as you can imagine, and in fact the degree of freedom that we're trying to develop as a qubit in this system is the spin of the electron, the magnetic moment. So each and every one of these electrons looks like a little bar magnet, and it's that magnetism that forms the qubit state that we're working with Now. On the quantum side, we have to develop better and more robust ways of controlling and manipulating that spin. But one of the things that really makes this system of electrons on helium powerful is the fact that it admits itself to scaling to very large processor size, and that's because we can integrate with the same technology that's used to make the computing chips in your laptop or your iPhone, namely this complimentary metal oxide semiconductor processor, cmos, and that is the thing that took classical computing to where it is today. You could put, you know, 10 to the 10 transistors onto a single chip, a monolithic chip, and you can make. You know, laptops, supercomputers, everything. And in order to make a powerful quantum computer, there are two real ingredients you need something that can scale to millions or billions of qubits and you need excellent qubits, and we're working on both of those.

Johannes Pollanen:

However, we've sort of taken this approach that we're doing it in reverse, because many quantum computing efforts, be they with superconducting qubits, superconducting circuits or ions or atoms, they start with the qubits as the like. Let's figure out how to make the best qubit we can, and then scaling is in some sense an afterthought, and that's largely because physicists like me were the ones doing it. We thought, oh great, we're going to do a cool experiment. That'll be a great way to do this, but that's not how you really build a technology. You have to think about how do we go to the range where we can actually build like a giant processor, because that's the one that's going to unlock the potential of quantum computing.

Johannes Pollanen:

And so what we've done is really put the scaling aspect first, and scaling has come to mean something a little different from everybody who talks about it. We mean that you can scale everything onto a single processor, a single chip, that's, you know, centimeter scale. That's called monolithic integration for those folks that think back to the way classical computing developed, and that's distinct from like having a modular kind of structure where maybe you build a hundred qubits over here and then you figure out how to connect them to a hundred qubits somewhere else and you build it in these little modules. Some people mean that by scaling and and that's largely because many of those other systems don't admit immediately to this monolithic integration. And but yeah, that's the system that we're trying to build. We're really focusing on the scaling and developing really good spin qubits. We have a lot of work to do on both fronts but we're making good progress.

Nick Farina:

I'll just come out and say that the reason the system was compelling to me as a business person is that it really is a system that is earlier in development than other systems but has no flaws. At this point. I think I can feel confident saying when it is fully developed, because when you look at other systems, each one of them have pros and cons and this is a system that, again, is much earlier in development. So when folks ask for numbers about oh you know what are your gate fidelities, for example, you know? Or how long is the coherence time?

Johannes Pollanen:

of your qubit.

Nick Farina:

We don't have answers to some of those questions yet because we're still developing a system, but the theory which has been worked on for 20 plus years by some very smart people, including at MSU, behind the system suggest uh,? and our research, uh and development so far has shown that this is a? Uh, a perfect system for building a quantum computer and that that's really what we're um, what we're going for is a system that is is sort of harder and and earlier in development but, um, over time and if you look at the history of computing, this is nothing new uh we've had over the history of computing, there have been first, second, third generation devices have been built, and this is a third generation device. We would probably say we're now on the third, maybe the second, but certainly third generation, in that it is a system that offers no trade-offs, which is really compelling about it.

David Washburn:

As you think about building the architecture and I know there's lots of applications that one can use quantum computing for. Well, first of all, what are those applications? And then do you think about those as you build your platform. Is there one sort of set of problem types that that might be more attractive to your architecture, or or not?

Johannes Pollanen:

yeah, in. In principle, the processors that we're building can attack all of the the use cases that you might imagine for a quantum nice, we're not limited in that regard.

Johannes Pollanen:

Now, one of one of the interesting things sort sort of my perspective on developing these kinds of things is we don't as a community yet know exactly when we're going to gain utility toward one of these problem use cases. Some people think it's going to be at the thousand qubit level, some people think it's when you get a processor that has 10,000. That would be really great. We know for sure certainty if you can put millions or billions of physical qubits and do large scale error correction, which our architecture, which we've planned out for our architecture, that will have tremendous utility in problems like cybersecurity. And that one interests me personally a little less, but one that really I find compelling is the development of new medicines and materials. And the reason that those use cases are specifically good for quantum computing is because molecules and materials are naturally quantum systems themselves and they map that problem of simulating those things maps very nicely onto computing. But one. So we don't have limitations, I think. And the materials and medicine and molecular chemistry kind of problems are the ones I find the most.

David Washburn:

Yeah interesting.

Nick Farina:

It will develop over time as we get, as Johannes mentioned, over time, just as in classical computing. And one thing that I'll underscore is that they're really. Even though quantum computing is different than classical computing, fundamentally the trajectory when which it will take will be somewhat similar, with the exception that it will be faster to applications. Because what's happening in quantum computing is you have people who are developing the applications at the same time that people like us are developing the actual computer chips, whereas in the early days of classical computing you didn't have a Microsoft, for example, you didn't have people who were developing operating systems. You didn't have people who were developing applications. Well, you did to some extent, but not nearly to the great extent you have today. Well, the tools didn't exist, the tools didn't exist Right, and we weren't exactly sure what these machines would be useful for. You know, back in the ENIAC days, yeah, whereas now JPMorgan Chase, for example, has 40 people who are working on what the applications will be for these computers In quantum.

David Washburn:

In quantum computers?

Nick Farina:

Yeah, that makes total sense to me, because they know exactly how the computers will work.

Nick Farina:

Because quantum computing, as Johannes mentioned universal quantum computers, gate-based quantum computers, which is what we're working on they all function essentially the same and there may be some, depending on the different metrics that you have of your quantum computer, different metrics that you have of your quantum computer, that will some will be better for certain problems than others. So, for example, long coherence times tend to be really good for development new medicines and very fast gate speeds tend to be good for finance. So again, ultimately we're looking to build a computer that has the best of all worlds. But certainly at this point we're not there yet and we think that you can really look back at the history of classical computing and that is a really informative guide to how quantum computing will develop, with the very important exception that the applications are being developed in parallel to the actual computers. So once we so it's not going to be a situation where we have a computer developed and then have to wait 30 years for applications to be run on that computer.

David Washburn:

So I imagine that's part of the company's sort of. One of the many things they do is you're probably building and courting sort of application developers or hanging out where application developers are hanging EeroQ and sort of mixing and mingling with them to make sure that you know, as they think about the stuff they want to build, that they consider this particular architecture.

Johannes Pollanen:

Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean the yeah, and it sort of fit to our. You know this is related in some sense to our business strategy and our. The way we viewed ArrowQ itself is we're really good at the hardware side. That's our expertise and you know, one can try each. E

Johannes Pollanen:

I mean in some sense all of these things that Nick just mentioned about. You know you have applications and operating systems and the hardware itself and error correction. You have all these different pieces and each one of them is really hard and for one company to try to do all of them, at least at the startup level is is not the greatest idea necessarily. That's right, yeah, and Dave doesn't. You know, none of us are, are we? We have to be collaborative, we have to work as a, as an entire industry and find the places where our complementary expertise overlaps so that we can push this forward, not just us but you know, like I said, the entire community yeah, arrow Q is 100, focused on building the quantum computing chip, and that's one of the things that makes our company unique.

Nick Farina:

Yeah, in the business side of things, yeah, uh, is that? Um, other companies and and we're not saying that we're right or wrong, uh, but it's. It's simply that EeroQ other companies and we're not saying that we're right or wrong, but it's simply that other companies have chosen to pursue working on applications and focusing more on it, whereas I think you said it actually very well, dave which is we're hanging out with the application developers to learn and understand what they're going to want and need.

Nick Farina:

But it really stops there. It stops with the hanging out and when it comes to the work that we actually do, our work there are no application developers that are working at ArrowQ, which makes it somewhat unique and a bit of a gamble, but, again in our mind, since these quantum computers we're building are universal gate-based machines, they have the ability and we have other folks at other companies. One thing I'll mention is when we started this adventure, uh, none of this really existed. Uh, so we started uh out at MSU and and, uh, well, the idea just started in 2016.

David Washburn:

And then you just read my next question. Yeah, keep going.

Nick Farina:

Awesome. So we, yeah, so our idea, uh, ideas and kicking things around started in 2016, um, when Johannes came to MSU, and then we incorporated in 2017. Yeah, and at the time, uh, there really you didn't have corporations, uh, which certainly didn't have 40 people at jp morgan right right working on thinking about this, yeah, right right, yeah, you, you, you really didn't have much of an ecosystem, certainly not a corporate one.

Nick Farina:

Uh, you had an academic ecosystem, of course, uh, but what has happened since is this business ecosystem has developed around us where now almost every major company is building a quantum computer or partnering with folks that are building quantum computers, and the major cloud providers, such as AWS.

David Washburn:

Microsoft.

Nick Farina:

Google they all have quantum computers available in their cloud now, and to think about this in 2016 would have been absolutely mind-blowing, because that was just something that had been done academically. Actually, at that time, bristol had put a quantum computer on the cloud. Academically, uh, but this was not something that, as a business person, I would have staked my fortunes on right right yeah, is that this? Would grow so quickly. Yeah, and it's really been amazing how quickly the business ecosystem has developed.

Nick Farina:

Yeah, quantum computing, uh, because, uh, you know, it's uh a bit of FOMO or fear of missing out uh where companies, uh, realize that if they don't, uh, if, if they are caught left behind in developing applications, uh, and their competitors get there, uh, and quantum computing gets there, then they're going to be in a tough position. And part of that is because companies like ours are developing, as we mentioned, these second, third generation processors that may be able to get to large amounts of qubits faster than earlier expected.

David Washburn:

Yeah. So how many people are in the organization today? And can you talk about how did you fund the company? Anything more you can talk about on the sort of, you know, getting the venture sort of launched and on its feet, and then, when you're done with that, I'm going to ask you about where you are because that's an interesting thing too.

Johannes Pollanen:

Yeah, so we have in.

Johannes Pollanen:

on the engineering side we have about a dozen people in the R and D facility in in Chicago and um, yeah, these are PhDs Most of them. Um, we have fabrication engineers who actually make devices. Um, we have the folks who come and bring them into the, into the R and D facility. We have the folks who come and bring them into the R&D facility. We have like, so you might imagine I mentioned liquid helium and electrons. We actually have to keep these systems quite cold. So we have these folks might be familiar with these dilution refrigerators that you see pictured in various quantum computing articles the big gold chandeliers.

Nick Farina:

Yeah, the gold chandelier yeah, and so we have those.

Johannes Pollanen:

Nice. And so people, our team makes devices, devices, bring them in-house, package them locally, yeah, uh, and then, and then perform the r&d testing there.

Nick Farina:

That's on the technical side equally important on the on the business side, we we only have a team of four, uh, that support the organization, uh. So we have my myself as our CEO, we have our executive vice president, fay Walton, Dave who is my partner in crime on the business side of developing the organization, and we have a director of HR who is critical and helping, also coaching folks, because there's a difference between coming from academia to working in a business, and she's just great at helping folks make that transition. And we have some folks that sort of span the divide between technical and business. So, for example, jenna Rose, our Director of Operations, is also on some of our patents on the technical side and is fluent in all of the machinery and technical machinery that we use.

Nick Farina:

So there's this. It's not a totally clean divide between oh, you've got the business people and we've got the technical people. There's a few people that span that middle. And then I really want to give a shout out to our initial co-founder, dave Ferguson, who still advises us occasionally to this day. He really helped us get off the ground with MSU when working with tech transfer, outstanding, and Dave Ferguson is another member of our team. So that brings us to about 16 total.

Johannes Pollanen:

Okay, and I forgot to mention a very important colleague and collaborator of ours in this is my colleague Steve Lyon at Princeton University.

Nick Farina:

Steve is an electrical engineer. His background is in semiconductor systems. He was a spin qubit guy, yeah, and so he's our CTO. And he's our CTO, Steve that's right. He certainly counts as one of those 12 technical. Yeah, that's right.

Johannes Pollanen:

And largely you know this Steve was also instrumental in putting forth the original ideas for this aspect of the scaling. The scaling is really important. You know, steve, he came from a semiconductor background where he could, you know, he knew that you needed to integrate cmos into this and so at some point, you know, he's been steeped in quantum computing for a long time, 20 plus years before quantum computing existed and and, uh, he, he really is in some sense the, the visionary on the scaling aspect.

David Washburn:

So I do I want to be very clear about well, it's, I mean you think about leveraging the sort of traditional uh semiconductors have found reason and companies have figured out how to scale.

Nick Farina:

So I mean, that's, that's why yeah, that's our tagline is building the computers of tomorrow with the technology of today. Yeah, totally, and that's really why we think we're going to be able to leapfrog many of our competitors is that we're able to use technologies. Every technology that is being used in ArrowQ's computers has been proven out to maturity in some other technology or in some other use, whereas in some other technologies there's still new science to be discovered. Certainly, every part of AeroQ's system hasn't been put together. If it would, we would be sitting here as a multi-billion dollar company, which we will be one day and we'll do an interview again and look back at these days. But one of the things that's important is that we are using all technology that has been proven out.

Nick Farina:

And just to get back to your question on venture funding, so one of the things that we did is we developed the company in two separate stages. So after my first company, I had built a second company and was successful with that company and had some funding available. And this also goes back to Dave Ferguson, who was our first major investor, alongside myself self, um, and we figured that, uh, or I as someone who had been in the startup world, um, for uh, now almost uh going. My first internship was 2003. Uh, so that, uh, I've been in the startup world for a while and one of the things that I've learned uh along the way from that first internship until now is that once you take venture capital, you've got five to six years to show a return to build a billion dollar company before you start to get into trouble.

Nick Farina:

And in 2016, we realized that we needed to de-risk the science. ..

Nick Farina:

We realized that we needed to de-risk the science much more and get to the capitalists. point The where we had a clear five-year pathway towards building a billion-dollar company, Nick and we just didn't 2016, one the which was I said, that's fine, let's come up with creative ways to de-risk the technology. So what we did and this is where MSU was incredibly instrumental in the building of this company is we provided sponsored research funding to MSU for a postdoc, dr Niaz Bazangulov, who was at MSU for about five years, who was at MSU for about five years, and then we had on our own side, dr David Rees was working on the Arrow Q side. So we had a collaboration between Arrow Q and Michigan State and that allowed us, for a very small amount of money or rather amount of money that was affordable for a couple of people to put in together Right, we were able to de-risk the science and get us to the point where we had that five year could see, within five years, building a billion dollar company and and therefore be ready for venture capital.

Johannes Pollanen:

Yeah, um, and along the way, we had been building relationships with venture capitalists the other aspect that that early time bought us um was, as nick mentioned already, in 2016. The rest of the ecosystem didn't exist. The industry there were not algorithm developers and cloud service providers.

Johannes Pollanen:

I remember we had one conversation at some point where I was like I don't know how to put anything on the cloud right, what on earth is that gonna look like? Nick was like look, they will. Well, that will figure out in. We have a strategy to figure all these pieces out exactly if if this really turns into an industry, he I'll never forget. He said all that other stuff is going to pop up out of the woodwork. It's going you're going to get companies that focus on building the cloud connection or focus on developing applications and all this stuff and it. That's totally how it went and it allowed us to stay to our core technology expertise as opposed to, like, trying to do a hundred different things.

David Washburn:

Yeah, no, I appreciate the focus and it's and I'm hearing hearing that as part of the theme here is is is the laser focus on the EeroQ and then there's sort of there's a whole bunch of other things you're paying very close attention to, but you also are smart enough to know what you can control and what you can't control, and I guess that's useful in other parts of life, right.

Nick Farina:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it tends to be, but, yeah, Johanna would. But. But focus is a great word that you picked up on as arrow cue is, you know, among the .. most focused companies in, in, in, in the field. And that's just based not only on my experience, but you know, on the lessons that I've learned from mentors over the years, that you've got to be focused and you can't take venture capital too early.

David Washburn:

I want to pick up on Chicago. You mentioned it earlier, johanna, so that's my hometown where I was born, and you spent their time there in school, and Nick sounds like you're a.

Nick Farina:

I was born there as well, in the suburbs.

David Washburn:

I have to say suburbs, okay, I don't want to falsely claim that I was born in the city okay, yeah, yeah actually I was born in the city, but Chicago did I was not raised in the city, but I've heard you both in the past talk about as, as you went about um out how to build the company. Even in the early days, what was really important to you was some, I think, capital and access to talent, and I think you had spent some time I'm not sure maybe it was both of you or one, but but you had sort of surveyed kind of the the quantum ecosystem in North America and, as you you alluded to, in 2016,. Not much existed, but you could see the writing on the wall. But I was curious if you could talk about that.

David Washburn:

I know there's other places around the country that have made sort of infrastructure investments. You know either state or sort or sort of regional uh infrastructure investments like um. Well, chicago certainly has, but I know there's other places, so could you talk about that and then how you ultimately? I mean Chicago is is easy cause it's close, but but Chicago has done a lot as well.

Johannes Pollanen:

Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll hit on some of these, and Nick can fill in the the blanks where I where EeroQ I missed something, but talent was a big part of it being able to. We have a, you know, this trapped electron approach to quantum computing is quite unique. It does leverage technology from you know and expertise from other quantum computing platforms, like ion trap systems and superconducting circuit-based quantum computers, but we really needed folks that knew electrons on helium, and so actually, our core technical team now are the world-leading experts in this. They're the people that developed the first single electron trapping devices. They're the ones that developed the first devices in which you can integrate CMOS. They're the ones who know how to couple superconducting uh resonators to single electron qubits. Yeah, Um, and, and so that was really important.

Johannes Pollanen:

And many of those 83% to be exact yeah, 83% of the world community give or take is is working at AirQ, and so some people, some of those individuals were already in Chicago.

David Washburn:

They were in Chicago.

Johannes Pollanen:

We're looking to get back to Chicago, um, and were already in chicago. We're in chicago. We're looking to get back to chicago, um, and and yeah, just having the, you know you have the the university of chicago, northwestern, where I did my phd uh argon national lab, fermi national lab, uh those resources all there's just constantly uh a pipeline of of talented uh quantum engineers looking for jobs, uh coming out of those places and that's a big driver Chicago But there's, you know, as you say, there's lots of other programs in Chicago state of Illinois that that that we leverage, that are that Covid really good. But yeah, talent was a big one.

Nick Farina:

And one of the different, one of the things that has changed. Covid was a horrible time for for many, but one of the things that came out of it that allowed um, the Chicago ecosystem to really change uh is when I was there as an entrepreneur, uh, in the, or in the 2000,. Uh, let's say 2009, 2010 era, Um, which was, and then earlier, so you know, my early formative days, in the 2003 type era of chicago, um, startups, um, there, historically wasn't a lot of of capital in chicago, um, and that and furthermore, um and this is where covid comes into play uh, folks did not want to invest outside of the valley or outside of boston or new york to some extent, uh, but what happened is uh?

Nick Farina:

now people um became familiar V uh, familiar with products like Zoom and investing from anywhere, exactly B So we have investors from all over the country now, yeah, that's right.

Nick Farina:

And our largest investor, v Capital, is actually based in Chicago, but our lead investor, b EeroQ Capital and that's not a typo, it's V, as in Victor is our largest and B, as in Bravo is our lead investor. They're a global firm, so they have offices everywhere and are affiliated strategically with the Boston Consulting Group, but we were able to get uh funding uh in chicago from from anywhere. Uh, so that was uh. Chicago is seen uh globally as a place to build startups. Yeah and uh. So that was one of the reasons that capital was available both locally, um, and people are very willing to put capital into Chicago.

David Washburn:

Well, it's all very exciting. Today, my guests Michigan have been Nick Red and Johannes Pollanen from AeroQ. We're very, very excited about what you've done and we're excited about, more importantly, what you're going to do in the future, and we're excited to have you here. There are roots from Michigan State in EeroQ your company and we're excited to be along for the ride and we wish you nothing but the best. Thanks for being here.

Nick Farina:

Thank you, and thank you to Michigan State, michigan State Foundation, red Cedar Ventures for all their support. It's truly, and, as Johannes mentioned, the idea came from Michigan State. Truly, and as Johannes mentioned, the idea came from Michigan State. So Michigan State is really the foundation, the core of AeroQ. So I would be remiss if I did not conclude with that.

Johannes Pollanen:

Thanks a lot. We'll see you next time.

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David Washburn

Host