Podcast with Rob Jesudason, CEO and Founder of Serendipity Capital

In this episode, Yuval Boger speaks with Rob Jesudason, CEO and founder of Serendipity Capital, a $1.3 billion permanent capital vehicle investing in quantum computing, communications, and sensing companies including Quantinuum, Monarch Quantum, Delta g, and QuantX. They discuss how investors — both institutional and retail — can evaluate quantum companies across modalities, with Rob arguing that triangulation across experts is essential since, as he puts it, modalities are like religion where everyone believes they’re right. Rob shares his view that the quantum industry is transitioning from lab science to managerial execution and engineering scale, that governments should partner with the private sector rather than being the first check, and that some countries should aim to be the fastest integrators of winning technologies rather than the innovators themselves.

Key Takeaways Evaluating quantum companies requires triangulating across many experts because modalities function like religion, with each believer convinced theirs is the correct path. The quantum industry is shifting from lab-driven science to managerial execution and engineering scale, meaning teams now need as much operational talent as physics talent. Governments should avoid being the first investor in quantum companies and instead partner with private capital later, stepping in as validators rather than initial funders. Countries without the scale to build a leading quantum hardware stack, like Australia, Canada, or Singapore, are better off becoming the fastest integrators of winning technologies rather than trying to be the innovators.

Transcript Yuval Boger: Hello, Rob. Thank you for joining me today. Rob Jesudason: Hi, nice to meet you, Yuval, and thank you for the opportunity. So who are you and what do you do? My name’s Rob Jesudason. I’m the CEO and founder of Serendipity Capital, and we invest in early-stage companies that enhance and secure critical technologies and infrastructure. And quantum is absolutely one of the technologies that we really focus on. Yuval: But not the only one, it sounds like, right? Rob: Not the only one. I mean, it’s technologies like AI, cybersecurity, semiconductors, space satellite, and quantum. And I think when we have these conversations, we often talk about technologies in silos as if they’re standalone things, but the magic actually happens when you combine the technologies, right? So it’s security on semiconductor chips. It’s space communication, quantum-secure communication. So we focus on where these technologies intersect to protect Western nations — the US and its allies — both governments and corporates. Yuval: How large is the fund? And I know you have a few quantum investments, so what’s in your portfolio? Rob: So the first thing I’d say is we’re not a fund, we’re a permanent capital vehicle. And what does that mean? That means we’re a company, and so when people invest in us or give us money, they become shareholders in a company versus unit holders in a fund. And that means we’re not driven to deploy capital in a certain window or exit investments during a certain window. The size of the business is $1.3 billion US dollars. And we have been investing in quantum since inception, which was 2019. But my background in quantum — I’m a business person, not a physicist, and I’ve listened to your podcast every week diligently, and you have very eminent physicists, so I wouldn’t claim to be one of those. But I was on the management board of a very large bank, and we made an investment with the federal government in 2013 in quantum, and that triggered my interest in quantum. And when we set up the firm in 2019, quantum was a key focus, and we’ve been investing consistently since then. Yuval: Can you tell us about some of your investments in quantum? Rob: Yeah. So we invest across modalities in quantum computing, quantum communications, and quantum sensing. I’ll talk about a few of those. Probably the investment that people know the most is Quantinuum. We went on the cap table in 2020. I was on the board, and we basically invested in every round from 2020 through to the IPO, and today we remain the sixth largest shareholder in them. And as you know, they are a vertically integrated, full-stack quantum computing company on their fourth system. We’re invested in Monarch Quantum, which is photonic laser light engines out of California. Photonic lasers is a multimodality capability or part of a quantum computing system. It’s typically 35 to 50 percent of the bill of materials of a quantum computer. In the UK, we invest in Delta g, which is a quantum sensing company. Their sensors can sense and identify objects 35 kilometers under the surface. We invest in QuantX, which is an Australian quantum atomic clock company that has sent its atomic clocks into space with SpaceX. So we’ve invested in companies that are looking under the surface. We’ve invested in quantum systems that are vertically integrated, selling into governments and corporates, and we’ve invested in quantum atomic clocks that are being sent into space. So we’re a broad church. Yuval: I think it’s very tempting to talk about the public markets. At QuEra, the question I get every day is, “Are you doing a SPAC anytime soon?” and so on. I’m not going to answer that — I just ask the questions, right? But how do you think about companies that are in the market right now, in the public market? First, as a permanent capital vehicle, does your charter allow you to buy shares in a public company in quantum? And do you think there are too many, too few, too early, too late? Rob: I think it’s a great topic to talk about. Our mandate allows us to invest in private companies that go public and hold that equity, and it also allows us to invest in public companies. So there’s the philosophical issue of should companies remain private for longer? Should they become public? And I think you can make the case for either. But let’s talk specifically about the quantum sector. I think the reality is, if you’re deeply embedded in the quantum ecosystem and you’ve been around for a while, rightly or wrongly, there’s been a little bit of negative selection in the people who’ve gone to SPAC, right? Anyone who’s an investor or an operator, as you are, Yuval, knows when people are doing private rounds, knows who can successfully raise capital, and knows who has gone and done SPACs. I think where Quantinuum was different — and I’m not saying this because it’s a portfolio company — but it was an IPO. And it was an IPO where they had to talk to long-only investors and strategics and get the support to do a formal IPO process and list. And I think going forward, there will be lots of great quantum companies that will do IPOs. I’m not particularly critical of SPACs. I think it’s a route, but I’m not sure… You know, I think there are some very good private companies who are not public because they can raise money in the private markets. I think Quantinuum was slightly different because their largest shareholder was a strategic who happened to be also breaking up as a public company — Honeywell, right? So it was a slightly different situation where they could have remained private. They had a very large strategic shareholder, and they were sophisticated enough, had the track record, had the strategic support and the long-only support to do a formal IPO process. I think the rest of the sector that has come through SPACs — there’s some credible companies, but it’s much more of a mixed bag. I think the future of the quantum industry is not a lot more SPACs, but more great companies going through the IPO process, getting a proper institutional capital base and strategic capital base versus a retail capital base, right? I don’t think it’s particularly good for quantum to trade like crypto. The future for quantum is for it to trade with less volatility, with long-term public support for those stocks. And so I think we’re in a transition period. Yuval: I mean, you mentioned that you’re not a physicist. I only have a graduate degree in physics, so from a lot of my colleagues’ perspective, I don’t understand anything about physics either. But we can have that debate some other time. So how does a retail investor who just reads, “Oh, quantum will solve all the world’s problems one day” — how do they choose which public quantum company to invest in? Or maybe that explains the volatility that you’re describing. Rob: Yeah. I’ll make two points. One is, how does the retail investor come to that decision point? And I think it’s very hard, right? Because there’s so much narrative, and there are some businesses where narrative is fair, but physics is physics. And narrative only goes so far. I think certain companies in the quantum industry have slightly done themselves a disservice by creating a gap between the PowerPoint presentations that people will read and the white papers that a lot of non-technical people don’t read. And so there’s a lot of momentum trading, and that leads to the volatility. I’d expand the point to a broader one: in a world where more and more private sector money is coming in, where many of the people, including us, are not physics PhDs, how do even they evaluate companies? And how we approach it is we built an ecosystem. We only ever sold shares to senior executives who had run large infrastructure companies, national security operatives, and scientists. One of our most recent investments was we took a stake in Emergence Quantum, which is an R&D lab with 25 physics PhDs. And we also have our ecosystem of portfolio founders who are physics PhDs, and we triangulate. I think what you have to do, whether you’re public or private, is it’s a global industry. You’re going to have to look at companies across the world, across the stack, and triangulate. And the reason is I always compare modalities to religion. Everyone believes there’s a God, but they believe they’re right. So just because you’ve got one senior advisor who’s a neutral atom expert or a founder you’ve backed who’s a trapped ion expert, very rarely are they going to say, “Look, to be honest with you, I reckon these two other modalities might be better.” So actually, you’re going to have to triangulate. And our view is the future is multimodality, and we think there are two or three modalities that are really interesting, including neutral atom. We think that’s absolutely one of the winners in the endgame. And I think QuEra is one of the winners in the game. We believe in trapped ion, and we think superconducting and spin qubits — across the seven modalities, we’ve taken a house view that some are more promising than others. But within that, I think triangulation is really important. And unfortunately, it’s hard enough as a private investor in an institutional business. I think it’s almost impossible for a retail investor today. But I’m interested in your view. You’ve obviously thought about this issue yourself. Yuval: Well, a couple of things. First, I’ve interviewed many CEOs from many different modalities, and not everyone, but many of them are convincing, saying, “Oh yeah, my spin qubits are going to rule the world because of this,” or whatever it is that they claim. And I remember asking one of them, “Well, if this is so great, why isn’t everyone doing it?” Rob: Yeah. Yuval: Exactly. And he basically said — he had a good answer, I think. He said, “Look, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I have forgotten things that others haven’t even learned yet. It would just take 20 years to catch up to where we are.” I sometimes give the analogy: you could be a fantastic oboe player, but that doesn’t mean you can play the violin tomorrow. Yes, you understand music, but the technique is completely different. The one question that I like to ask is to say, “Okay, I understand you believe in your modality. Let’s assume you are convinced that it’s not going to work. You’re hitting a wall. You discovered something that just doesn’t work for you. What’s the next best modality that you would choose?” And I think that’s an interesting question. That’s a telling one for where at least the insiders feel about something that’s not just theirs. Rob: Yeah. And I think that’s why I take a view that — and you’ve had other guests who’ve talked about the attributes of different modalities and the reason why different modalities are useful for different use cases, and I’m not going to rehash that — but I agree with that, and I think the future for the winners is to be multimodality, at least for a certain period. This comes also back to the universities, right? As you know better than me, I’m sitting in Boston today.

The Lukin Lab has produced more than one neutral atom company.

Oxford Physics Department has created more than one trapped ion company. So it starts there, as you rightly say. They’re people who have spent 20 years of their life on a single modality, and they come through these schools, and therefore they end up there. And there’s nothing wrong with that, and they all have their attributes. In a world of seven modalities, our view is there are two or three that are going to be the pivotal ones in the next three to five years. And I think the winners are going to be companies that take advantage of that. The other thing I would say for your listeners is I think the industry is in a fundamentally different place today than six or seven years ago when we started investing in quantum at Serendipity. It is about the science, it is about modalities, but we’re entering the phase of managerial execution and engineering scale, right? The challenge for the companies is: you have proved as a company you’re one of the leaders in your modality. Now you have to build a scale institution that can ship one system, then several systems. And that’s a very different challenge. That’s not being in the lab, that’s not getting some financing. That is tens of thousands of engineering hours. That is building engineering processes, and that’s a different challenge. That’s the challenge the winners are at today — building scale enterprise — and it’s going to play out in the next three to four years. And for us, it’s never been more exciting. Yuval: When we spoke about your portfolio, you mentioned several companies and they’re all hardware companies, or at least primarily hardware companies. Where are your software investments? Rob: Well, look, I would say we invest across the stack. We have mentioned some hardware companies. Monarch, I would put in the control systems, the middle layer. But we’ve invested in BlueQubit — I’m sure you know the guys — they’re out of Harvard, Shankar’s business. We’ve been more focused on the hardware and the control systems at the moment because really for software to progress, you need the systems to be higher quality. You need the error correcting to be higher quality. I think we’re moving into the era where software — really, it’s algorithms — becomes more interesting. We really like the BlueQubit guys. I’ll name a company we’re not a shareholder in: I think Phasecraft is a really interesting company. They are out there. But I think the magic, the action — whatever phrase you want to say — is on the hardware side, the systems side, the control system side. Often people over-focus on the hardware side. I think there are going to be control systems players that are going to be multimodality, and they’re going to be oligopolists or monopolists in that area. And from an investor perspective, that’s really interesting. But the algorithm companies will come. And what’s your personal view? Do you feel that the time is now for algorithm companies? We’re being relatively slow. We’re being very selective. Maybe we’re being too slow. What’s your view? Yuval: My view is that the hardware is getting there. At QuEra, the company I work for, we announced a deal with AWS to put a fault-tolerant quantum computer on the cloud in 2028. And I say, “Okay, well, who’s going to use it? What are they going to do? What algorithms?” So assuming the hardware works — and it works, but it could work better and larger, so there’s still absolutely work to do — there’s going to be a point where the software matters. Some of the software, especially the software that’s close to the hardware, may be something that the hardware companies just want to keep themselves — like Intel and the microcode, or NVIDIA and CUDA, right? For that purpose or something like that. Rob: Yeah. Yuval: But I completely agree. So let’s— Rob: Sorry, I must say, if I kick myself on one investment we should have done that we didn’t do, it was Classiq, and I know you used to work for Classiq, right? We looked at it in 2020 or ’21, and we looked at it again in ’22, and we should have done it. And we didn’t because we were like, “Is it too early?” But they’ve done really well. Yuval: Well, for a permanent capital company, sounds like your horizon should be a little bit longer. But yes, they are an excellent company. I enjoyed working there. I enjoyed helping them with a portion of their journey, and I hope they will succeed — as a shareholder as well. Let me ask you a different question, though. Let’s assume that tomorrow you decided it’s time to go into public service, and the government calls you and says, “We’re making these huge investments in quantum, and we’ve got this budget, and we want you to help us allocate it across various companies.” Do you divide it equally into 17 slices and give the same amount to each company? What’s your strategy? Do you pick winners? Can the government do that? What would you recommend? Rob: Yeah, that’s an excellent question and a hugely topical question given sovereignty issues around technology. We’ve thought a lot about this and we talk to a lot of governments around the world, and I’d make three or four points. One is, all governments aren’t the same. So let’s talk about a group of countries that could legitimately try and build the definitive world-leading system in a modality or create a leader in part of the stack — e.g., ASML in semiconductors. I think for that group of countries, you do sort of have to pick winners. I’m not about spraying it across the ecosystem. There’s a certain amount of ecosystem things you have to do, but the reality is the winners need to scale, they need capital, and if you don’t have capital, you may lose them. I’m from the UK, and Cambridge Quantum and Oxford Ionics are good examples of good companies that ended up being part of large US companies today. And so the issue is, are governments qualified to pick the winners, as you rightly say? And therefore, I think you have to partner with the private sector. You shouldn’t aim to be the first check. You should be the last check. Because too often these governments are the first check, and they’re picking the wrong companies, and they’re propping up companies that the private sector really doesn’t want to fund. I think there are particular examples in continental Europe where that would be the case. I’m not going to name them, but there are examples of that. I think what the US has done very well is — you’ve seen in the last three months the government investing in some companies — but actually most of these companies, the leaders in the US across modalities, have primarily been private sector funded. There have been DARPA grants and other things on the edge, but what has driven their scale has been private sector financing, and actually the governments come in towards the latter stages. And you can see that even with some of the debates on AI. I think there’s another set of countries where they’re smaller countries, they have capital, they have intent, where it’s not particularly realistic to build a leading system in a modality. And this might be a controversial topic, but my personal view would be, you know, Australia, maybe Singapore, maybe Canada might fall into that group of countries. But what you can then do is: can you be one of the first countries to get the latest system into your country from the leaders? Can you then build an ecosystem around it? Can your corporates in that country partner with that company to build use cases faster than anyone else? So I would say there’s a set of countries who potentially are the innovators, and there’s a set of countries that should realistically aim not to be the innovators, but the fastest integrators of the winning technologies into their economies. And I think that’s where governments should lean in. Yuval: That’s an interesting perspective. And by the way, that’s maybe where software comes in. If you don’t think that your country can be the leading superconducting vendor, then maybe you could be the leading software vendor for quantum computers or for a particular type of application. Rob: Yeah, so if you take a country like Australia, which has two of the biggest mining companies, or Canada — between them, they have disproportionate global share of mining — then you should create the software for that industry and dominate that industry. But you might be leveraging US hardware to do it. That’s exactly what I mean. Yuval: You’ve been in quantum several years now. What’s new? What have you learned in the past 12 months that made you say, “I wish I knew that before”? Rob: I’d say there are a few things. Whether it’s over 12 months or over three years, there’s a recency to it. I think it’s this point that we’re moving — we’re out of the lab now. We are into an engineering world, and that has different requirements for management teams. It’s never been more important in quantum to have the balance between the engineering talent and the business talent, and … Yuval: Unfortunately, we experienced a recording problem and the last few minutes of my conversation with Rob were not captured. He did choose Oppenheimer as his dinner guest, one reason being that he thought the physics and the government policy are coming together after many years, just like in Oppenheimer’s time. I thanked Rob for a very interesting conversation and hope to have him again in a future episode. Yuval Boger is the Chief Commercial Officer of QuEra Computing. August 17, 2026