NAVISP attended the 4th Annual Commercialising Quantum Global 2025, May 13th-14th 2025, London UK

Last Updated: 23/06/2025 13:04     Created at: 23/06/2025 13:04

This year the conference celebrated the UN International Year of Quantum, with around 300 attendees from industry, academia, government and private investors. Run by the Economist, the discussion centred on how organisations can implement quantum technology and presented use-cases with a view to increasing investment in this field. 

Several aspects of the UK’s national quantum strategy were presented by Lord Patrick Vallance, Minister of state for science, research and innovation, Sir Peter Knight, Chair of UK National Quantum Technology and Dave Smith, DSIT, in summary:

Quantum is a key part of the UK's research and innovation strategy through the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme, a £1 billion collaboration between industry, academia and government to transform quantum science into globally competitive new products and services. Five Quantum research hubs have been set up including one dedicated to Quantum Enabled PNT which will focus on quantum timing and sensors that will maintain the UK's security and infrastructure. A further commitment of £121 million in new quantum technologies has recently been announced to secure the UK's national advantage and build on early investments in this field. Commercialisation of PNT is high on the agenda for this funding, as £46.1 million will be provided via Innovate UK to support computing, sensing, networking, and PNT and £10.9 million goes to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) for quantum measurement integration in businesses.  The UK is also fostering partnerships with Europe, US and Australia and have signed several MOUs. The aim is to escalate quantum research into products and generate a return on government investments. The UK was an early investor in Quantum technology and this has paid off as they have developed advanced quantum sensors and clocks, Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) algorithms and quantum computers. A new quantum strategy report will be published in June 2025.

PNT was mentioned as a key opportunity by companies, universities and venture capitalists and the presentations on quantum sensing were of particular interest: 

• Magnetic Navigation: Q-CTRL presented results from recent trials demonstrating their quantum magnetometer, in combination with a denoising and map-matching software stack using AI to integrate HW and SW, on ground, Airbus aircraft and drones.  Their system outperformed INS by up to 46× lower positioning error in GNSS-free navigation conditions (see article and paper) achieving quantum advantage in sensing. 
• Quantum Sensing: University of Birmingham (one of the UK quantum hubs) presented their work on quantum gravimetry and an ongoing activity with Imperial College using their quantum inertial navigation system for train location testing on the London Underground. They consider gravimetric underground sensing to be a large market opportunity. Quantum LiDAR is another opportunity area (where fewer entangled photons are needed to provide better detection and security) for target recognition in autonomous vehicles, currently used in defence applications.

Discussions focused on when quantum advantage will be achieved in computing (when quantum computers will consistently outperform classical systems in real-world applications) and what the parameters for this assessment should be. Also addressed was when is the right time for governments, companies and VCs to invest in quantum computing (Answer: now). IBM and Google are currently leading the field and other key players are Microsoft, Amazon, D-Wave and Rigetti. IBM recently reported that quantum advantage will be achieved in 2026. The general agreement was the need for systems:

• Scaling to at least 100 logical qbits with coherence times (the amount of time a qubit can maintain its quantum state before decoherence occurs) of at least 1 millisecond 
• With a massive reduction in the noise induced error rates from the current 1e-3 or 1e-2 to 1e-9 (one error in a billion) or lower to increase reliability of results. 

Several presentations analysed quantum security: The need for post quantum cryptography or quantum key distribution, mainly in finance applications to maintain security for cryptocurrencies, prevent banking fraud and also prevent hacking of company databases. 

A panel on quantum for AI concluded that these two technologies will need to be used together to advance both fields. Machine Learning will increase reliability in algorithm development and reduce errors in quantum computing. Quantum computing can work with ML to solve complex problems (e.g. in drug discovery) much faster than classical computing.

The need for application specific quantum standards was presented by NPL. NIST in the US are developing quantum national security standards which large organisations e.g. Kraft rely on. 

The conference closed with an ESA keynote from Harald Hauschildt, program manager of ARTES ScyLight, who gave a high-level overview of ESA’s quantum-focused missions.

Following this event, NAVISP is in conversation with several companies to develop new activities within the programme.