Quantum startups in Europe are grappling with a shortage of talent in key roles as they race to scale headcount and commercialise after a year of record funding.
The snag they’re up against is that they need people with highly specialised expertise that’s developed over years in academia, and founders and VCs tell Sifted that more quantum roles are being created at European startups than there are engineers, physicists and scientists to fill them.
In 2022, consultancy firm McKinsey found that there was only one qualified quantum candidate for every three quantum job openings.
“Talent shortage in most of tech is bad but quantum is worse,” according to one source who contributes to a UK government-coordinated working group of quantum, chip and AI companies, who asked to remain anonymous due to confidentiality agreements.
“A common comment [in the working group] was ‘fixing funding would be nice but it is secondary to talent — if we just don’t have the engineers then money won’t help’.”
Quantum boom in a talent vacuum
Quantum computing is still an emerging technology. While scientists expect that it will unleash groundbreaking computational power once fully developed, moving the tech from the theoretical into the practical has been difficult.
Qubits — the quantum equivalent of bits in a normal computer — only hold their quantum state for very short periods, resulting in errors that limit the size and performance of the machines. Companies in the field are looking at different ways to overcome these challenges, from using different types of qubits (such as photons, electrons and ions) to developing error-mitigating techniques.
Quantum companies are only starting to commercialise the first versions of their quantum computers, which are still too small to provide any advantage over traditional computing. But there are signs the technology is moving in the right direction. Last month, Google said that it had broken new ground on a technical challenge around the instability of quantum systems, which could pave the way for larger, more scalable quantum computers.
Investor interest in the field is growing, and 2024 was a record year for funding in the quantum sector. Startups picked up $2.2bn globally, according to Dealroom — up from $522m in 2019. Before then no single year had seen more than $300m pumped into the quantum sector.
Big Tech companies like Google, IBM, Intel and Nvidia are all working on hardware and software for quantum computing and stocks of quantum companies on public markets have soared in recent months — though they recently dipped again after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said practical quantum computers were 20 years off.
Governments in the US, UK, Germany and EU have also pledged billions of euros in financial support to the sector in the past few years, and European startups including Riverlane, Quantinuum, Oxford Quantum Circuits, Pasqal and Quandela have all raised chunky rounds in recent times.
That means that they’re hiring — but from a small pool of available talent. Francesco Ricciuti, an investor at Runa Capital, points out that this year’s market buoyancy will take time to translate into smart new people entering the field, as complex quantum science takes years of study to learn.
“The market gives a signal and it takes time for the workforce to adapt,” he tells Sifted. “In quantum it’s hard to hire skilled people who’ve got experience in a lab — which usually means completing a PhD or post-doctorate.”
Job shortages
Marine Xech-Gaspa, chief of staff at Paris-based startup Quandela, which builds quantum computers with photons, tells Sifted that photonic engineers or quantum algorithms experts are particularly hard to recruit.
Depending on the degree of expertise and seniority needed, the pool of candidates for some jobs is sometimes limited to a dozen people, says Xech-Gaspa.
While this has not been a major issue for the company, Xech-Gaspa anticipates that the talent gap will become more problematic in the near future, as Quandela plans to roughly double the size of its 100-strong team over the next three years.
Alongside talent shortages for roles focusing on the technical quantum challenges, companies are also faced with hiring bottlenecks for roles focused on the systems that wrap around that technology — like software and hardware that help power quantum computers and integrate them with classical systems.
“There’s consensus across the quantum industry that demand for traditional engineering skills in areas like semiconductors, hardware and embedded software are driving [talent shortages in quantum],” Neil Dickins, founder of deeptech recruiter IC Resources, tells Sifted — adding that engineers in those areas can apply their skills in a number of sectors.
“Meta and Google are coming in and offering big compensation packages and they’re looking for the same people as quantum startups [for non-quantum engineering roles].”
How to address the talent gap
Quantum talent is currently coming out of prestigious universities like Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, and École Polytechnique and École Normale Supérieure in France — but startups say that academia must get up to speed with the pace of development of the quantum sector to increase the supply of experts needed to bring the industry forward. “Academic training needs to accelerate,” says Chloé Poisbeau, COO at French quantum computing startup Alice & Bob.
In 2020, Pascale Senellart, the cofounder of Quandela and professor at French engineering school École Polytechnique, participated in the creation of a new quantum diploma called ARTeQ. It’s available in several academic institutions in France, and enables students in fields like physics, chemistry and mathematics to train in quantum-related subjects over the course of just two semesters.
Similarly, the Quarmen master is a two-year international master that launched in 2022 across universities in France, Italy, Portugal and Canada, for bachelor-level students in physics or related topics. It trains them in quantum science and skills, includes training in ‘entrepreneurial skills’ and facilitates internships in quantum companies and startups.
“Engineering schools are getting familiar with quantum,” Olivier Tonneau, partner at quantum VC Quantonation, tells Sifted. “Academic training is starting to be more equipped.”
Some startups are using a “learn on the job” approach. Diana Ford, head of people at Riverlane, tells Sifted that the company has gotten around the problem by recruiting tech workers from other industries, then teaching them how to apply their skills to quantum.
“There are people from the Riverlane team who have previously worked at large semiconductor companies,” she says. “They are now applying classical methods (ie: computing, chip design) to quantum challenges.”
Europe versus Big Tech
Unfortunately for startups, some of their competitors also happen to be some of the most valuable companies on the planet.
Poisbeau says to compete with the likes of Google, AWS and IBM you have to be able to offer something beyond money, because you’ll never win that tug of war.
“Clearly, they can offer salaries that are twice as high, or more, as what we can offer,” she says. “We have to sell something else — another culture, another way of working that can attract employees.”
There are already examples of this working in practice. Former AWS quantum scientist Steve Flammia told Sifted last year that he had left the cushy world of Big Tech to join UK startup Phasecraft because he felt like he “couldn’t contribute meaningfully” in a bigger organisation.
“Startups are much more agile; I’m much closer to being able to influence the direction of things, I’m much closer to being able to inject ideas that are likely to have an impact,” he said.
Europe might also have an edge over US rivals. McKinsey research shows that the EU and the UK have the highest number and density of graduates in quantum-relevant fields globally, followed by India, China and then the US.
Callum Stewart, associate at investment bank GP Bullhound, tells Sifted that he is taking bets on Europe-focused startups for that reason. “We have a view that [quantum] companies would need to have an established or concrete roadmap for building a presence in Europe to access the enhanced talent pools.”
What’s coming next?
The number of quantum roles being hired for in Europe has doubled in the past two years, says Dickins, who predicts that the bottleneck is only going to tighten as the sector takes off.
“We’re at the beginning of a commercialisation of research,” he says. “There will be a lot of players trying to compete with each other.”
The hiring crunch could eventually see companies acquiring startups to access their people if breakthroughs ramp up and practical applications for the tech seem closer to a reality, says Simon King, partner at Octopus Ventures.
This happened during the initial AI boom in the early 2010s, with the most prominent example in Europe being Google’s deal to snap up DeepMind for $400m in 2014.
We could also start to see big strategic investments from Big Tech companies into startups, as we have with Microsoft heavily backing OpenAI and Mistral, and Amazon backing Anthropic, as they try and align themselves closer to the best teams.
Whatever happens, it’s looking like quantum could be the next frothy talent market, following in the footsteps of AI where the best researchers are being offered eye watering salaries. Europe’s startups will have their work cut out as they try and hold on to the brightest of the bunch.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/quantum-talent-shortage/
