Global lessons from a Spanish start-up

In July, the Spanish AI/quantum firm Multiverse Computing became a European unicorn. It announced it had almost closed its €500m funding round, which would value it at around €2bn post-money.

When I joined as its senior adviser in April 2022, the firm had only 30 employees and two locations: its headquarters in San Sebastian and an office in Toronto, Canada, whose first client was the Bank of Canada.

With more than 400 staff representing over 45 nationalities and operations in more than ten locations, including San Francisco and Qatar, what lessons can start-ups glean from the firm’s trajectory? 

Government support

The Basque city, best known for its culinary scene, was not an obvious place to establish a frontier technology firm. Enrique Lizaso, the co-founder and CEO told me he attributes it to the San Sebastian city council and the Basque government’s vision and political will in courting the start-up in its early days to coax it to begin its corporate journey in San Sebastian.

“They understood that the Basque Country needed a competitive new industry to be based there. They took a serious risk on small companies – they bet resources on firms that might fail,” he said.

In the ensuing years, the government’s business-friendly policies and its ability to react quickly to the demands of deep technology companies kept the firm anchored in the Basque Country.

Now, in 2026, a northern region of Spain with a population of only 2.2 million hosts a thriving quantum, AI and biotech community, its strength reflected in IBM’s decision to install its most advanced quantum computer in San Sebastian rather than in a larger city like Barcelona.

Flexibility is a must

Clad in his signature waistcoat, jacket and bowtie, Lizaso warned startups against focusing on a particular solution – flexibility is a must – and says it is key to “pay attention to what is happening around you”.

Multiverse Computing began its journey concentrating on quantum algorithms for finance. Its commercial mindset led it to ask customers what they needed – something that many start-ups led by academics fail to do – while figuring out how this would fit with the wave of AI sweeping the world.

The consequence was technology born out of quantum and AI that can compress large language models (LLMs), reducing the computing resources needed to run them.

It is a solution to one of the biggest problems facing the world: the massive energy use and cost of LLMs. Already in 2024, data centres consumed more energy than the entire annual electricity of the UK, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The institution expects that to double by 2030.

Consider contingencies

Multiverse is concentrating on the demand for energy-efficient solutions that can continue operating in military or political conflict. This means enabling AI ‘on the edge’. “No one thinks of using a mobile phone without AI, but it can’t be on the cloud [for security and cost reasons],” said Lizaso.

Companies are becoming more aware of the possibility of both Wi-Fi and access to the cloud being cut off, either by an enemy or, potentially, by an executive order from the US government. Most major cloud providers are American.

Consider complementary skills

Lizaso also advises startups to ensure their founders have different talents. Lizaso’s background is in banking and medicine, while his co-founders bring expertise in areas including quantum computing, technology, marketing and entrepreneurship.

The four founders worked together for a couple of years before starting Multiverse Computing, another important component on the human side, and “we have fun together [outside the office]”, said Lizaso.

Consider culture

That is where San Sebastian’s reputation for great food comes in. It has the highest concentration of Michelin-starred restaurants per capita in the world, plus mouth-watering local pintxos bars. All four founders share a love of good food and good wine. Yet another reason to maintain Multiverse Computing’s headquarters in the seaside city, and for quantum-AI start-ups to be open to surprising locations.

The City Quantum & AI Summit - Race for Growth

Quantum Matters: Quantum & AI – Early Days For A Killer Combination

Guest Post by Karina Robinson

Artificial Intelligence (AI) suffers from two massive blocks: colossal, costly energy use and a transparency deficit. The technology can be technically feasible but is still too expensive for most organisations to consider it. That was the conclusion of a recent paper from MIT Future Tech, which looked at computer vision tasks as an example of an AI-enabled technology. But the MIT group isn’t alone in highlighting the problem.

The computing cost of Deep Learning is exploding. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, made it clear last year that training ever larger Language Learning Models (LLM) is not the way to advance AI, not least because teaching GPT-4, its latest product, cost over $100m, while by 2027 it is estimated that the AI industry could consume as much power as a country the size of the Netherlands.

On the openness front, the models are far too opaque – usable in consumer applications but a legal minefield for companies to consider rolling out. Their tendency to ‘invent’ plausible facts is also not helpful.

Quantum is the route through which AI’s limitations can be lifted.

Two perception issues are delaying the advance. Firstly, there is an impediment to AI/Quantum cooperation based on misapprehensions that quantum is only about hardware – creating a quantum computer with enough power to break current encryption. That is unlikely to happen for several years. It may take up acres of media space, but much more advanced are quantum sensors, some of which are already in the market, while in quantum communication the Chinese are apparently more advanced, and quantum software/quantum-inspired software is advancing at pace. All of these are based on quantum physics and applicable to AI in different ways.

The second issue is the silo mentality of many of the companies involved in these fields, who have separate divisions for AI and Quantum, or only concentrate on one. Nevertheless, more visionary firms are breaking through the barrier.

Scott Faris, CEO of US firm Infleqtion says, “The convergence of AI and Quantum is one of the most powerful combinations that we are starting to unlock. The convergence will have both immediate and long-term implications.”

Karina Robinson is Senior Advisor to Multiverse Computing and Founder of The City Quantum & AI Summit

The firm, which manufactures quantum products and parts, ranging from sensors to computer hardware, counts NASA as one of its clients. Faris points out that quantum-enabled technologies are “quickly demonstrating their utility in addressing the crushing data infrastructure scaling challenges driven by AI. Scaled networks of quantum sensors will create vast new data sets of unparalleled precision and value which will be unlocked by parallel advancements in AI.”

A case in point is CompactifAI, the product launched late last year by Multiverse Computing*. Europe’s largest quantum software and quantum-inspired software firm, which counts Bosch and the Bank of Canada among its clients, uses its technology to compress the data from a Large Language Model (LLM) by up to 70%, thus using much less computing power, and achieve results that are comparable in quality.

“Left on its own, AI is going to burn the world by consuming intolerable levels of energy,” says CEO Enrique Lizaso. His firm, shortlisted as one of three finalists in the European Future Unicorn Award, is using its AI and quantum-inspired capabilities in fields ranging from forecasting weather catastrophes – on the increase with global warming – to helping car manufacturers in the training of their Machine Vision.

This is done on the premises of the industrial site, rather than data processing centres, with faster retraining of the multiple streams of data, reduced processing power requirements and added security.

Lizaso is adamant that the cross over between AI and Quantum is environmentally helpful in other ways. He notes that optimising routes for shipping, for instance, or optimising the amount of fuel tankers need for a journey, cuts back on the carbon footprint of the ship.

Nvidia, best known as the AI chip market leader, is also keen on quantum.

“AI is accelerating quantum computing today. We’re starting to see researchers tap into the mature infrastructure of AI and accelerated computing to leverage things like Large Language Models (LLMs) to develop new quantum algorithms and improve the performance of quantum computers,” says Tim Costa, who leads the HPC and Quantum Computing Product Team.

“We are just starting to scratch the surface of how Gen AI can improve quantum computing,” he adds, noting however, that in the near term researchers are already investigating quantum machine learning (QML) and quantum-inspired methods for financial applications like fraud detection and forecasting.

Recently, researchers from the University of Toronto, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and NVIDIA developed a new quantum algorithm called the “GPT-Quantum Eigensolver.” It uses the framework of generative AI models to generate quantum circuits with desirable properties, in this case to calculate the ground state energy of molecules of interest. Versions of this generative quantum algorithm can be applied towards important problems in drug and new materials discovery, as well as a host of other applications, some of which we cannot even imagine.

As for the problem with the unclear thinking process of AI, and its fantasising, quantum is also part of the answer.  To use it more widely, the interpretability of the system is key – in essence understanding why a system makes the decisions it does so it can be held accountable. Only last week Quantinuum, formed from the merger of Cambridge Quantum and Honeywell Quantum, announced a first public step in creating AI that is “interpretable and accountable” via the development of a framework for compositional models of AI using a type of maths called category theory. Their academic paper has yet to be peer reviewed.

Humankind’s biggest challenges will not be solved tomorrow by the combination of Quantum & AI. Nevertheless, at the risk of creating a hostage to fortune, I would predict many will be solved in the next decades by those firms at the forefront of the Quantum & AI journey.

*Karina Robinson is Senior Advisor to Multiverse Computing and Founder of The City Quantum & AI Summit which takes place on Monday, October 7th.