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Quobley, a French quantum computing startup, this week announced a collaboration with STMicroelectronics, a Franco-Italian global semiconductor company, to produce quantum processor units at scale.

Based in Grenoble, Quobly’s technology is based on 15 years of collaborative research between internationally recognized Research and Technology Organizations, CEA Leti and CNRS. By leveraging STMicroelectronics’ advanced FD-SOI semiconductor process technologies, a technology it has developed and exploited commercially for years across automotive, industrial and consumer applications, Quobly said the collaboration is poised to make large-scale quantum computing feasible and cost-effective, positioning both companies at the forefront of next-generation computing technologies.

Quantum technology taps into the unusual behavior of atomic and sub-atomic particles to perform far more complex calculations than today’s computers. The hope is that this could lead to breakthroughs in drug discovery and previously unsolvable problems as well as solutions that have the potential to generate higher returns for business.

In its December 11 announcement Quobly, which launched as a company in 2022, said it aims to break the 1-million-qubit barrier by 2031, targeting applications ranging from pharmaceuticals, finance, materials science and complex systems modeling, including climate and fluid dynamics simulations, says founder and CEO Maud Vinet. Together, Quobly and ST aim to drive down R&D costs and address the market's demand for scalable, affordable quantum computing processors.

“The quantum community needs to be able to produce at scale and right now there is not a realistic cost-effective path,” Vinet said in an interview with The Innovator. “Our work with ST is this path.”

The theme of the TiE Global Summit 2024 in Bangalore, which gathered over 25,000 attendees Dec. 9-11, and featured well-known speakers such as bestselling author Deeprak Chopra and tennis champion Andre Agassi, was “Putting Entrepreneurship First”, with a focus on reshaping the future of global entrepreneurship.
Highlights of the conference, which is organized by TiE Bangalore and supported by the Karnataka government and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, included the launch of an India-Israel innovation corridor project with 10 Israeli startups specializing in dual-use technologies aimed at the India market (see the photo); a TiE women pitch competition which highlighted the leadership and innovation of women entrepreneurs worldwide and an initiative which recognized outstanding early-stage startups from across the globe. Read on to get the key takeaways.

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Israel’s Airobotics specializes in fully autonomous drones equipped with AI-driven data analytics for real-time surveillance, mapping, and disaster response. Its drones are tailored for smart city planning, industrial monitoring, and public safety operations, offering rapid aerial data collection and actionable insights for decision-makers. Its customers include the defense, semiconductor manufacturing and public sector. It is currently selling in Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the U.S.

“We build, operate and help clients implement autonomous drone infrastructure that comes into play in smart cities in order to provide aerial services to residents, businesses, factories and the public sector” says Yotam Guggenheim, Airobotic’s vice-president of corporate development. “Think of us as a new type of utility,” he says. In the future companies are likely to prioritize aerial infrastructure in their evaluation of where to locate business operations or factories, he says.

“Just like the Internet is now considered a part of critical infrastructure we believe that going forward aerial infrastructure for transportation and data collection will be critical,” he says. “We would like to be the first ones to deploy this utility around the world.”

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The World Economic Forum’s latest Net Zero Industry Tracker reveals progress in reducing emissions across eight hard-to-abate sectors – steel, aluminium, cement, primary chemicals, oil and gas, aviation, shipping and trucking. Together, these critical industries, which play a crucial role in the global economy, achieved a 0.9% reduction in absolute emissions from 2022 to 2023 but global energy-related emissions rose by 1.3% in the same period.

Progress remains far behind the pace to meet Net-Zero targets. The Forum report finds that an additional $30 trillion in investments is required by 2050 – underscoring the scale of the challenge ahead. This includes $13 trillion of direct funding from the industries and $17 trillion from the wider ecosystem such as energy suppliers to these industries.

Encouragingly, nearly half of the required greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) reductions can be achieved with commercially viable technologies already available, according to the new research. The report also found that emissions intensity – or the average emissions per production unit – has declined 4.1% over the past five years, highlighting the impact of existing solutions. Intensified cross-sector collaboration, faster deployment of clean-energy infrastructure - in particular renewable electricity - and stronger policy making will be crucial to advance these efforts and unlock the transformative potential of emerging technologies, according to the Forum.