The New Quantum Era
Quantum Open Source with Will Zeng and Ziyaad Bhorat
Why It Matters
Open‑source infrastructure is the glue that turns emerging technologies into sustainable industries; without it, quantum computing risks becoming fragmented and dominated by a few proprietary players. This episode highlights a timely opportunity for funders, corporations, and the broader tech community to invest in the public‑good software layer that will enable a more inclusive and innovative quantum future.
Key Takeaways
- •Open-source quantum software sits between academic grants and VC funding
- •Mozilla invests philanthropy early to shape quantum ecosystem
- •Unitary hackathons attract global contributors, creating on‑ramps
- •Community building precedes workforce development in quantum field
- •Rapid hardware gains heighten urgency for open-source tools
Pulse Analysis
The episode spotlights a persistent funding gap that leaves open‑source quantum software stranded between academic grants and venture‑capital product drives. Will Zeng and Ziyaad Bhorat explain how their joint white paper argues that this public‑goods layer—benchmarks, compilers, training material—remains under‑financed despite its critical role in scaling the quantum ecosystem. The Unitary Foundation, a 501(c)(3) created in 2018, and the Mozilla Foundation, longtime champions of open‑source internet health, are positioning philanthropic capital to fill that void and steer the industry toward collaborative standards.
Both guests stress that community‑first strategies are the engine behind sustainable quantum development. Unitary’s annual hackathon series, dubbed Unitary Hack, offers bug bounties on projects such as MITIC and Q‑TIP, drawing contributors from Eastern Europe to high‑school students in India. By white‑boxing early Rigetti software, they demonstrated that non‑specialists can fix real bugs, creating practical on‑ramps for a diverse talent pool. This grassroots model mirrors Mozilla’s open‑source bug‑bounty programs and lays the groundwork for a quantum workforce that grows organically rather than through top‑down mandates.
The urgency escalates as hardware breakthroughs compress timelines once thought decades away. Private investment surged to over $10 billion in 2025, up from under $100 million before 2020, while companies like Google and Iceberg Quantum claim to halve qubit counts needed for RSA‑2048 attacks. Without coordinated open‑source tools, the field risks fragmentation and missed standards. Zeng and Bhorat argue that early philanthropic support can lock in inclusive, transparent infrastructure, ensuring that the quantum race benefits a broad developer community rather than a handful of proprietary vendors.
Episode Description
Quantum Open Source with Will Zeng and Ziyaad Bhorat
In this special live-streamed discussion, Will Zeng, co-founder of the Unitary Foundation, and Ziyaad Bhorat, VP at the Mozilla Foundation, join host Sebastian Hassinger to unpack their co-authored white paper, The Open Foundation Quantum Technology Needs. The paper argues that open source quantum software is structurally underfunded — too applied for academic grants, too public-good for venture capital — and that philanthropic organizations need to step in before the window closes.
This conversation arrives at a pivotal moment. Google recently published a paper showing Shor's algorithm could break ECDLP-256 with roughly 500,000 physical qubits — a 20x improvement over prior estimates — while Oratomic launched claiming 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits may be sufficient for cryptographically relevant computation. The timelines are compressing. The question is whether the software ecosystem can keep pace with the hardware.
The video of our conversation can be viewed on YouTube.
What you'll learn
Why open source quantum software falls into a structural funding gap between academic grants and venture capital — and what that means for the field's trajectory
How Mozilla Foundation evaluates emerging technology fields for philanthropic intervention, and what specifically convinced them quantum was ripe for engagement
What Google's 20x efficiency gain for Shor's algorithm and the Oratomic launch mean for Q-Day timelines and post-quantum migration urgency
Why the "quantum Linux" analogy is useful but incomplete — and what the real risk is (fragmentation, not monopoly)
How Unitary Foundation's microgrant program ($4,000, six months) has become a faster on-ramp to quantum careers than traditional academic pathways
What PyMatching, PyZX, and other microgrant-funded projects reveal about the scalability of small open source investments
Why open source benchmarking through Metriq Gym matters — and why vendor-driven benchmarks can't fill this role
How the Qiskit team reductions at IBM illustrate the fragility of corporate-backed open source in quantum
What specific policy asks the quantum open source community has for the NQI reauthorization
The von Neumann vs. ENIAC lesson: why openness wins over secrecy in building transformative computing platforms
Resources & links
The Open Foundation Quantum Technology Needs — The white paper by Zeng, Castanon, and Bhorat (March 2026) that anchors this conversation
Unitary Foundation — 501(c)(3) non-profit building, governing, and sustaining open source quantum software since 2018
Mozilla Foundation — Non-profit championing open source and internet health, supporting Unitary Foundation's quantum work
Mitiq — Open source toolkit for quantum error mitigation
Metriq — Community-driven quantum benchmarking platform
Metriq Gym — Open source benchmarking suite for quantum computers
Unitary Compiler Collection (UCC) — Quantum circuit compilation tools
QuTiP — Quantum Toolbox in Python, stewarded by Unitary Foundation
PyMatching — Open source decoder for quantum error correction, originally funded by a UF microgrant
PyZX — ZX-calculus library for quantum circuit optimization, also originating from UF support
Unitary Hack — Annual bug bounty hackathon connecting open source quantum projects with global contributors
CSIS Commission on U.S. Quantum Leadership — Warning on quantum decryption surprise referenced in the white paper
Will Zeng — President and co-founder of Unitary Foundation; Partner at Quantonation; DPhil in Quantum Information, University of Oxford
Ziyaad Bhorat — VP of Imagination and Strategic Growth, Mozilla Foundation; PhD in Political Science, UCLA
Key quotes
"Do we want a future where quantum computers are developed by secret government contractors with specialized PhDs who have top secret security clearances? Or do we want a future where quantum computers are built in the private sector, competing to provide economic value to everyone around the world?" — Will Zeng
"Do not be afraid to experiment. We're doing ourselves a disservice to be slow, especially in a space that really warrants experimentation." — Ziyaad Bhorat, on his message to philanthropic colleagues
"There's billions of people on the planet who want to do exciting and interesting things. Building quantum technology is one of those. If you have enough motivation, you just need to provide some on-ramps." — Will Zeng
"We should put forward an affirmative vision of what that future should look like and drive towards it — because otherwise it will be built in secret." — Ziyaad Bhorat
"The US spends 30, 35 billion on potato chips every year. There's a lot of room to grow." — Will Zeng, on the scale of quantum investment relative to what's needed
Related episodes
Ep 19: Quantum Error Mitigation using Mitiq with Misty Wahl — Deep dive into Mitiq, one of Unitary Foundation's flagship open source projects discussed in this episode.
Ep 35: Quantum Benchmarking with Jens Eisert — Explores the challenges of quantum benchmarking that Will Zeng addresses with the Metriq platform.
Ep 29: Quantum Education and Community Building with Olivia Lanes — Parallels to the community-first approach to workforce development that both guests advocate.
Ep 53: Fostering Quantum Education with Emily Edwards — The Q12 initiative's approach to quantum education, complementing UF's open source on-ramps.
Ep 79: Building a Quantum Ecosystem from Scratch with Martin Laforest — How Quebec built a quantum ecosystem — relevant context for the white paper's argument about building open infrastructure early.
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