BOULDER — Colorado — and particularly the Boulder area — has for decades been a global epicenter for quantum research, and now, as that research is beginning to be commercialized, business, government and higher-education leaders are jockeying to position the state and region as titans of the emerging quantum economy.
In furtherance of that effort, the University of Colorado, with the support of Colorado State University, Colorado School of Mines and Elevate Quantum, is spearheading the establishment of an incubator for quantum-technology startup companies in east Boulder’s Flatiron Park corporate campus.
“I can’t wait to see what’s accomplished in this building,” CU president Todd Saliman said recently during a ribbon-cutting at the 13,000-square-foot incubator space on Central Avenue. “It‘s just another indication of Colorado’s leadership in the (quantum) sector, and another step forward as we have that global role of leadership in this space.”
The incubator will have areas for offices and labs, Scott Sternberg told BizWest. Sternberg is the executive director of the CUbit Quantum Initiative, the University of Colorado’s interdisciplinary hub dedicated to the advancement and commercialization of quantum technology. The office space will likely be available for companies to begin moving in during the third quarter of this year, with laboratories potentially coming online by the end of the year.
This type of incubator is a key component of “nurturing a thriving quantum ecosystem that includes everything from startup to pilot to scale,” Gov. Jared Polis said.
Quantum theory attempts to explain the behavior of matter at atomic and subatomic levels. Because quantum computers take advantage of special properties of quantum systems such as superposition, their computing power and speed are exponentially greater than a traditional computer.
Applications of quantum science could revolutionize the way that humans discover new drug therapies, map the cosmos, protect sensitive data, combat climate change and maybe even discover new forms of life in deep space.
The United Nations has proclaimed 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, celebrating the 100-year anniversary of physicist Werner Heisenberg’s publication of research that formed the basis for quantum mechanics.
Quantum science “all began in the Einsteinian world of 1925, but today’s not about that,” CU chancellor Justin Schwartz said. “Today’s about the next 100 years, and about the incredible impact that Boulder and our partners across the state … are going to have on advancing quantum science and technology.”
The Boulder Valley — with the CU physics department, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and JILA (formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics) — has become, over the past three decades or so, one of the world’s premier quantum hubs.
The “constellation of quantum facilities across Colorado,” as Schwartz described it, is expanding with the recent establishment of facilities such as the National Quantum Nanofab Center, a machine shop at launched at CU with a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation where researchers can build tiny quantum devices; and Quantum Commons, a Colorado School of Mines-led project that will transform a 70-acre property in Arvada into a $40 million quantum research, commercialization and manufacturing collaborative.
“There’s so much to do that no one can do it alone,” Schwartz said. “But one region can do a lot of it. The Colorado region and the Mountain West can really drive this forward in a way that makes Colorado the home of the next generation of transformative technologies.”
The collaborative effort to establish the Boulder quantum incubator “is indicative of how the universities, government leadership and economic-development partners across Colorado work together to turn innovation into economic opportunity,” Boulder Chamber CEO John Tayer said.
Elevate Quantum, a nonprofit consortium of about 100 stakeholders who represent industry, academia, capital and laboratories in Colorado and New Mexico, has been tasked with much of the heavy lifting required to facilitate statewide (and beyond) collaboration.
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Tech Hub program granted Elevate Quantum a Phase 2 Tech Hub designation last year that unlocked $127 million in state and federal funds, which are expected to generate several billion more dollars of private investment in the region’s quantum industry.
“We were the only ones to get it, and what a statement that is about the importance of Colorado in this sector,” Saliman said of the federal Tech Hub designation.
Beyond the schools and laboratories where quantum discoveries are made, Elevate Quantum supports the marketplace “mission of dramatically accelerating the commercialization of this technology,” Elevate Quantum CEO Zachary Yerushalmi said.
“Inventing a technology does not give you an automatic right to benefit economically from that innovation,” he said, noting that Silicon Valley was the major economic beneficiary after the discovery of the lithium-ion battery in the United Kingdom last century.
Colorado’s quantum economy employs about 3,000 workers, but that figure could more than triple to about 10,000 within the coming decade, according to a 2024 report from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade.
The Centennial State’s quantum workforce is “bigger than anywhere else on the planet, but it still is just a start,” Vescent Technologies Inc. CEO Scott Davis said. “We got to turn that into tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands. To do that, we have to have facilities and organizations that help grease the skids for transitioning the transformative breakthroughs that come out of our universities and our national labs into the private sector and into companies.”
Boulder’s new quantum incubator is located at 5555 Central Ave., a building that San Diego-based BioMed Realty LLC bought as part of a $625 million, 1 million-square-foot, 22-building portfolio acquisition in Flatiron Park in April 2022. The company has spent the last few years transforming the park into a life-sciences and technology campus.
“We’re really trying to accelerate this process” of building out the interior of the incubator space, Sternberg said. “We’re fortunate that a lot of the bones of this facility have already been permitted and completed” by BioMed’s redevelopment team.
