For the 100th episode of The New Quantum Era, the microphone turns around. Bob Karr — partner at Barnes & Thornburg, co-chair of the firm's Quantum Technology Industry Group, and lead architect of the *Quantum Law Navigator* — invited Sebastian to Chicago for a live audience recording at the firm. In front of scientists, investors, policymakers, and students, Bob leads a wide-ranging conversation about what 99 episodes and a new book have taught Sebastian about where quantum technology actually stands, what building a foundation of understanding in an emerging field really requires, and what comes next — including the Helgoland documentary, the evolution of quantum ecosystems, and the launch of Build Quantum Partners. ---

What if the bottleneck in scaling trapped-ion quantum computers isn't the qubits or the lasers, but the design software underneath them? Daniel Faircloth, PhD, co-founder and CTO of Nullspace, joins Sebastian to explain why ion trap engineers have been forced to bend legacy electromagnetic solvers around problems they were never built for — and what changes when you build a simulator from scratch for the physics of confining single atoms. It's a conversation about the quiet emergence of a quantum EDA layer, the engineering work that turns hardware roadmaps into reality, and why nanometer-precise ion height predictions are harder than they sound.

What if the path to a million-qubit processor doesn't run through silicon defects or massive wire bundles, but through single electrons floating a few nanometers above a film of superfluid helium? Nick Farina, co-founder and CEO of EeroQ, joins Sebastian to explain why his team bet a decade on the only commercial electron-on-helium quantum computing platform — and what their recent results, including a new *Nature Physics* paper demonstrating strong coupling between a microwave photon and a single electron on helium, suggest about scaling, coherence, and the "wire problem."

What does it actually take to run a quantum-classical workflow on a real cancer drug — not hydrogen, not a toy molecule, but a photosensitizer already in Phase II clinical trials? Sabrina Maniscalco, CEO and co-founder of Algorithmiq, joins Sebastian to unpack the science behind the company's Wellcome Leap Q4Bio win, its €18M raise, and its move from Helsinki to Milan. Along the way: error mitigation, tensor networks, sampling tradeoffs across hardware platforms, and an honest look at where quantum advantage in chemistry might actually land.

Quantum computing has plenty of seed-stage capital and a handful of growth-stage giants — but the Series A and B rounds in between are where promising companies stall. In this episode, Sebastian sits down with Kris Naudts and Zeynep Koruturk, co-founders of Firgun Ventures, the first VC firm built specifically to fund quantum scale-ups, to talk about why that middle stage is so hard to underwrite, what they learned as early Cambridge Quantum Computing angels, and how they're deploying a $250M fund across computing, sensing, and communications.

Yuval Boger — Chief Commercial Officer of QuEra Computing and one of quantum's most prolific podcasters — joins Sebastian for a crossover episode that doubles as a working session between two people trying to make quantum computing comprehensible. They compare notes on writing books for non-physicists, debate how close neutral-atom systems are to genuine quantum utility, and dig into why the gap between physical and logical qubits is narrowing far faster than most public roadmaps suggest.

What happens to fault tolerance when a quantum computer's job is not to spit out a classical answer, but to produce a quantum state that gets sent somewhere else — to another core, another machine, or across a network? Mathias Christandl, professor at the University of Copenhagen and director of the Quantum for Life Center, walks Sebastian through a reframing of the fault tolerance theorem for quantum input and quantum output, and what that shift means for distributed quantum computing, channel capacities, and the practical path to useful quantum simulation in the life sciences.

What does philosophy of science actually *do* for quantum technology at the moment quantum mechanics is being asked to deliver? Elise Crull — historian, philosopher of physics, and 2025 APS Fellow — joins Sebastian to talk about how interpretive choices are quietly built into quantum hardware, why definitions of entanglement and decoherence matter for engineering, and what archival work on EPR, Grete Hermann, and Hertha Sponer reveals about the stories quantum computing tells itself today.

Every quantum computer — superconducting, spin, trapped ion, or neutral atom — depends on a layer most people never see: the precisely timed electronics that play qubits like a microwave-frequency piano and read the answers back. Niels Bultink, co-founder and CEO of Qblox, joins Sebastian to explain why the quantum control stack has become a strategic bottleneck for scaling quantum hardware, and how a Delft spinout is building the picks-and-shovels of fault-tolerant quantum computing while expanding into the U.S. through a Boston headquarters, U.S. manufacturing in Massachusetts, and a partnership with Fermilab on the open-source QICK platform.

Quantum hardware iteration is gated by the simple fact that real QPUs are expensive, scarce, and noisy in ways that generic simulators don't capture. In this episode, Izhar Medalsy, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Elements, explains why the industry is still building "wooden models in the air tunnel" — and how hardware-faithful digital twins, scaled to a distance-7 rotated surface code with 97 physical qubits on AWS HPC, could give pulse engineers, circuit designers, and QEC decoder teams a faster, cheaper place to iterate.