Podcast with Dorit Dor, co-founder of QBeat Ventures

Yuval Boger interviews Dorit Dor, co-founder of QBeat Ventures and former senior executive at Check Point. They discuss lessons quantum startups can draw from the evolution of cybersecurity, including the importance of go-to-market strategy, focus, and adherence to standards. Dorit outlines her fund’s cross-stack investment strategy, compares different quantum modalities, comments on public market dynamics, and highlights the growing Israeli quantum ecosystem and its potential for future impact. Transcript Yuval: Hello Dorit, and thank you for joining me today. Dorit: Hi, and thank you for inviting me. Yuval: So who are you and what do you do? Dorit: My name is Dorit Dor. I spent 30 years in leadership C-level roles at Check Point, where I managed R&D, delivered product, managed the M&A, and some of the growing business units. Before that, I did deep tech leadership roles in a famous 8200 unit related to the IDF, and I did a PhD in computer science, theoretical computer science, mainly algorithms that are relevant for our story. So I spent my career deep diving into very hard problems and solving hands-on some of them. I then also joined the Technion Council, etc. A few years ago, two years ago actually, I made a deliberate shift and joined my partner, Maya Netzer, who’s an entrepreneur by herself, to found QBeat Ventures. QBeat Ventures is explicitly and exclusively focused on quantum technologies. We wanted to invest in quantum technologies because we saw it as the next frontier and we were so excited about the opportunity of reinventing the computer. So I think it’s really an exciting moment to deep dive into new topics, see how an industry is growing into something real, and looking forward to exercise everything I learned from cyber. Yuval: So you are in a superposition of a geek and a capitalist, is that fair? Dorit: Yeah, yeah, quite fair, yes. And I’m working on my entanglement between the particles. Yuval: Since you mentioned cyber and things you learned from it, what do you think quantum entrepreneurs or quantum companies can learn from your experience in the cyber field? Dorit: That’s very good. I actually looked a lot at this point. There are generic points from everything, that entrepreneurs should be passionate, should have an unfair advantage understanding the problem they have at hand. They should be willing to kind of spend all their energy into solving this problem. They have to realize that this is really an important problem to solve. But there are some specific elements that I think we could learn from cyber. The first one is about not only technology, but also go to market. Technology by itself doesn’t sell. Some technologies think that they just throw the technology in and it sells itself. It’s not the case. And you have to tie a very specific go to market and understanding of where you want to go into the technology in order to be successful, in order to make sure that what you do would end up scaling, etc. So you have to have a holistic picture of everything. The second part is focus. It’s easy to get confused in quantum space. I hear many people that are doing end-to-end, full stack, all the parts, mainly because it’s not yet structured, it’s not yet modular, it’s still, I would say, in infant stages. But focus is important. You can’t do well all the things. The earlier you understand that you have to rely on other parts of the ecosystem, the better you are. And obviously, on the cyber side, there are learnings in the cyber, like spaces like PQC or QKD. There are multiple learnings there. The most important ones are that people don’t want you to reinvent cryptography. They want to use standards and they want to stick to whatever is approved because they have no way to certify your cryptography. And in addition, they will buy the default. They would buy what’s working good enough and what’s feasible for them to implement. And not necessarily making it a bit more secure, but very, very strange and hard to operate will not help you. So there are many other more concrete lessons in cyber, but I think these are two very important ones. Yuval: When companies go to talk about quantum computing, there are two popular angles. One is the risk angle. Oh, quantum can break your encryption and can steal your data and so on, and therefore you should do this and that. And the other one is the opportunity. Quantum can solve problems faster, easier, more efficiently, or what have you. As an investor, is there one direction that interests you or excites you more than the other? Dorit: Yes, I actually started this affair, renewed affair with quantum based on it being far from cyber and excited to make good things. So I’m really excited about solving new problems, solving problems that were not solved before. And this is where I started. Many people come to me with my expertise in cyber and quantum and offer a different solution there, so I could not ignore them and that’s part of the stack. But that’s not the main motivation or the main decision behind getting the fund established. I also think that it’s super exciting to solve. Fairness, some parts of the encryption were broken over the years by other motivations, by computers being stronger, by finding problems in encryption. So this is not the first time ever that encryption will be broken. Yuval: If you think about solving problems that haven’t been solved before, where does it happen? Does it happen on the hardware side, on the operating system, on the delivery, on the application? Again, I’m trying to ascertain the focus of your interest and therefore maybe your investments. Dorit: Yes, so maybe I’ll start by saying something I didn’t say before. The fund is, we did first closing on the fund in January this year. We have four portfolio companies, we are operational, we target to get to a $50 million investment and a portfolio of, say, 15 companies. We intend to invest in all the sides of the stack, but I will not shy away from trying to answer your question. So, the point is the following. In quantum, there are periods. There is the period of the NISQ, there is the period of the fault tolerance, there is maybe the period of scaling when there is more modularization and standardization. And the winners at every stage are not exactly the same. As a fund, we want to create also a shorter-term value in addition to longer-term solutions, etc. So we are interested in different parts of the stack. If I want to say where the value is coming from in the short term, it’s going to come from hardware, computer core computers, components. And for the applications to be ready, they have to be ready to scale to high volume at the moment that the computer is ready. So they have to be ready to address a wide audience as soon as the computer is strong enough. And then also provide the talent for these solutions and many other things. However, the winners in the short term are not always the winners in the long term. And in the long term, there may be different modalities with modularization. Components could be winners. You have to have a component that’s differentiated, that everybody needs you within the stack. There would be more applications developed by then because there would be stronger computers that could run the applications. And even on services, if you have a really scaled service, maybe a vertical service that solves the whole picture for a specific user, for somebody who’s looking for materials or somebody who’s looking for drugs, that delivers everything from the hardware all the way to the software. This could also work assuming that you are built to scale, that it’s not like manual services and it’s something that is ready to scale when everything is ready within the stack. Yuval: You mentioned four portfolio companies. Could you name them? Could you describe them briefly? Dorit: Yes, happy to. The first is Quamcore. It’s a company, it’s an Israeli company that’s targeting to put the control inside the cryogenic device within superconducting. Getting more density of qubits into the cryogenic device in superconducting is a super important problem. They have an innovative idea how to do it and they are backed by academics that are top notch. The second company is Orange QS, Orange Quantum Systems. It’s a Dutch company. It deals with testing and validation of qubits. They have the expertise. They are selling into the ecosystem, so they are selling into creators of qubits. And actually each one of our companies is selling into a different variant of an ecosystem and buyer. The third company is called Keeyss. It’s a PQC quantum safety company with serial entrepreneurs that got investment from their lead seed investor for the fourth time. They understand what it takes to bring enterprise crypto to market, to adoption. They have a pragmatic approach. And the fourth company is Quantum Art. It’s an Israeli trapped ion company, core computer. It has a very strong potential differentiator with a very strong technical team, and they do represent a very good aspect of the Israeli ecosystem. Yuval: How would you describe the value that yourself and your partner can bring to entrepreneurs that work with you other than, of course, the money? Dorit: Yes, of course, this is not the only value I want to bring. I spent 30 years as a very strong operational person with the ability to scale companies, acquire them, and to integrate technologies. I can bring this operational value to clients, to portfolio companies. I can understand and connect the dots between very technical, deep points all the way to what could scale and what could work and bring this insight, including market overview that they don’t, that they are blind to, into the company. As a team, we both come with operational background, we both add value to the aspects of scaling a company from go to market, from expansion in different geographies, bringing talents. And lastly, we also are having very good ties into the ecosystems and connections. We could bring connections to companies with clients, with other peer companies, with talent or experts that could help different topics. And we have very good connection to high-scale funds that could help in later rounds of the fund. I think if I want to summarize it, it’s about an end-to-end kind of assistance. It’s about the operational aspects and it’s about really capturing the value all the way from the technology into what creates the value in the market. Yuval: You mentioned Quamcore, which is superconducting, and Quantum Art, which is trapped ions. So first, are you open to investing in photonics or neutral atoms or silicon spin qubits and so on? Related to that, do you envision one modality ultimately beating the others? Dorit: We are open to investing in more modalities. I think that not one modality takes it all in the near future. In the far future, like 20 years from now, there would be surely consolidation. There are modalities that I would call them more risky in the sense that they are not yet operational and modalities that are in a sense working, but maybe would not scale to the high numbers. I think it’s very legitimate to invest in multiple modalities. Specifically, you also want to invest in multiple horizons and in multiple stages of companies. I think that photonics, because you asked about photonics, is a very interesting modality. It has some problems to solve, and I wouldn’t necessarily invest in building a stadium-size kind of photonic computer. I’ll try to look for something more efficient. But I think there are steps in this direction as well in photonics. Spin qubits is very interesting because it has the opportunity to be room temperature, well-fabricated. There is this dream that one day the quantum computer will be really kind of building blocks like the regular computer is today and would not look like this strange, very strange entity that we have today, and spin qubits may do this. But in the near future, I think that different modalities than photonics and spin qubits are winning. So I will look at the opportunities of investments that we have and I will certainly consider a different stage of opportunity in different modalities. Yuval: If I go back to Check Point, 30 years ago, I think Check Point essentially invented the firewall or had to teach organizations what a firewall is. Where do you see quantum today? Do you think that the customers understand the risk and the opportunity, or there’s still a lot of market education that needs to happen? Dorit: A very good question. I think that first, quantum today kind of reminds me of the cybersecurity of the ’90s. We didn’t have the word cyber at that point. We had different terminology and it was a kind of a well-kept secret. It for sure was not scaling as much as it is today. But I think that today we are in a much different stage of communication and awareness, and I think that many people do know about quantum today. The point is that they don’t really know what to do about it or what will it do for them, what can it do in the future. So they are kind of, yes, I know that it exists, it’s very interesting, but I have no clue about it. I think that the opportunity with it is that we don’t need everyone on board to start the inflection point. We need a good few applications with a working quantum computer that could run them with a motivation of one or few big enterprises that are starting to use these use cases. And once they say, I need a quantum computer to solve this problem because my regular computer cannot solve it, we have a win. The win will be kind of the first winner will be winning something, then the next winner, and then there would be more applications, more vertical spaces near this one space, more players within this vertical that would say, “We must go in and start playing with it.” So I envision a snowball effect of this inflection point that doesn’t have to start from everybody understanding all the problems at hand. And with the existence of cloud infrastructure and of AI, we could also make it available in this very strange mode, whether you are like a cryogenic device or a table of lasers or very strange types of computers, make them available through cloud to a wide audience and make the applications available to AI so that it could be consumed by a few people even before we have this absolute wide understanding of the space. Yuval: How are you thinking about public markets these days? There are several companies who are rushing to the public market, sometimes via a SPAC. You see the valuations. Is that sort of the trend of the future? Is that irrational exuberance? I mean, when would you recommend any of your portfolio companies to go through this route? Dorit: I grew up at Check Point. I joined Check Point in ’95. In ’96, Check Point was traded on the Nasdaq. It was very, very fast, very early in those days. And I grew up with high appreciation for public markets. I grew up believing that companies in the public markets have some superiority because they have passed some barriers and they are in some kind of product-market fit and scalability, etc. The problem is that this whole behavior doesn’t happen with SPAC. With SPAC, there is no guarantee that the outcome is indeed a superior outcome. And we end up with a method of becoming public that relates to all the public companies in the quantum space that is SPAC. And it’s not very credible in understanding what it is. Actually, many investors in this don’t even know that they are investing in a kind of a SPAC-originated company. And I think that in a sense, the valuations in the public market are just a result of crowd decision that is not necessarily educated. And the technology they get invested in is not necessarily educated. Obviously, there are good things in the public market, but this is not very educated. I think that we have to make sure that at due date, we will have the right valuation for the right technology. So if a company could go public on a regular basis, on a regular structure today, I obviously advise them to go public. But if they can’t, the question if they would go to SPAC or not is a complicated question. Some of it has to do with how much acquisitions, for example, they want to make. It gives them cash to make acquisitions, etc. But I personally see a very big difference between investing in the public market of quantum to investing in the private market of quantum. And I think that the public market of quantum is not like one piece. It’s not well representative of what we could do in the quantum space. Yuval: You mentioned that you are on the board of the Technion and that several of your investments are Israeli companies. What can you tell us about the Israeli quantum ecosystem? Dorit: So, because I’m here in the neighborhood, I also joined the board of the quantum community. There is a very veteran quantum community in Israel, actually started in 2018. A group of people helping each other, creating events, etc. Last year it became a formal NGO and I’m sitting on that board. It’s a very active group. But going back to the industry as a whole, we have a very famous military training called Talpiot that takes young people and teaches them physics and other skills and then gets them into working in their profession and actually delivering solutions. And I feel that this pool of physics experts is something that’s feeding very well into the quantum economy in Israel and into the ecosystem of building startups. It’s also a very strong pool into the universities. There are many leading universities in Israel that have a very strong quantum space, and combined with the nature of Israelis that are kind of messy but from that comes also innovation and culture of out-of-the-box thinking, etc., it combines a very good opportunity for quantum. We also have leading companies outside of companies that we invested in. We have Quantum Machines, that is very famous for doing controls. Classiq, that is very famous in serving enterprise clients with applications. Quantum Source is a photonic modality, and we actually have representation of most modalities in Israel. And Qedma, leading with error mitigation. So we have good names of companies from which an ecosystem could rise. So my experience from Check Point, some people grow within certain companies and then spread around, understand more problems and create more startups. So I envision more startups to come in Israel and I think that the ecosystem is well structured into making it happen. Yuval: As we get closer to the end of our conversation today, I wanted to ask you about classical computing and especially in the context of go to market. What do you think is the role of companies like whether consulting companies or classical security companies in helping quantum companies go to market? Is that a completely separate discussion or do you think there should be more partnerships and collaborations there? Dorit: I think that it is a problem, because quantum will solve some part of the problem, no matter if it’s narrow, wide, or something, but it will solve only part of the problem. And the core relationship with the classical or AI computing into the quantum computing is also very fundamental. You have to understand that it would be a cross-relationship, that you have to pass the data, and that within the quantum computer you’d use computing methods such as FPGA and machine learning and others in order to calculate certain parts of the dynamic element of this entity. So I think there is a cross-collaboration that is inherent between classical computing and high-performance computing and quantum computing in the near future and in the far future. I’m actually always remembering what Bill Gates said about computers, so I may be wrong and in the future quantum computers will replace all the layers, but until we get there, I think that there are many layers that have to coexist with the quantum. However, I don’t think that this is the critical part. I think that if we had the strong core of quantum, because quantum computers today look very kind of strange, not well packaged, not well modular yet, we will figure out how to connect it to all the right things. And I think the biggest challenge in quantum is the quantum computing itself, is the element within the quantum computer. It’s the stack within the quantum computer that matters. And so it is an important point, but I don’t think because of it, we are getting any delays in delivery. Yuval: And last hypothetical, if you could have dinner with one of the greats of physics, dead or alive, who would that be? Dorit: So I’m a computer scientist at the end. I like algorithms and I’m excited about reinventing the computer. And so I’m very much intrigued about how to think about the future applications that could run on a quantum computer. And I also am a brainstorming person. I like to do brainstorming in groups. So I decided to invite for my dinner four people: David Deutsch, Peter Shor, Scott Aaronson, and John Preskill, and ask them or think alongside with them, what is the right structure for what applications and what components of applications could we expect to run on this creature called quantum computer into the future? This is a question that is very interesting to me. Yuval: Dorit, thank you very much for joining me today. Dorit: Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me. Yuval Boger is the Chief Commercial Officer of QuEra Computing. April 20, 2026