Pavel Hrmo

Pavel has been working at the frontier of experimental quantum science and technology for over a decade. During his PhD at Imperial College London he worked to bring fundamental quantum control techniques from the mainstream to the underexplored Penning trap ion approach that now lies at the heart of ZuriQ technology. He then moved to the University of Innsbruck to the lab of Prof. Rainer Blatt to work on scaling quantum computation with state of the art surface chip traps. In 2021 he joined the research group of Prof. Home at ETH Zürich and participated in a big scientific breakthrough, demonstrating a 2D reconfigurable architecture for trapped ion quantum computing that was published in Nature. Off the back of this result, he co-founded ZuriQ in April 2024 to commercialise this novel approach and join the race to build a utility scale quantum computer. As CEO he has grown the company from an empty lab to a team of 11 scientists and engineers working tirelessly to push the boundaries of qubit count and quality. Along this journey he has raised 4M EUR from lead VC investors and launched a valuable partnership with semiconductor manufacturer Infineon to build the chips that power ZuriQ’s computers.