ARVADA, Colo. — Colorado School of Mines students and graduates are working to fill a gap in the quantum market.
What started as an idea on campus to make a quantum amplifier has now turned into a Colorado-based start-up called Bifrost Electronics.
"The amplifier, our chip that we're building, is about a centimeter by a centimeter — it's a tiny little thing — but what this thing does is enables us to take signals from one area to another without distorting them, and it's a critical component," Logan Pauli, chief technology officer at Bifrost Electronics, explained. "Quantum computing cannot run without these components."
Pauli is originally from Michigan and moved to Colorado for the School of Mines' quantum engineering program, which started in 2020. He said the idea for the quantum amplifier first began when he discovered a research paper and shared it with his labmate, Connor Denney.
"He [Denney] went back to his dorm room that night, and on his computer, he spent a Friday night building out a design, going, 'He,y could this work a different way?' And we just chatted about it," Pauli said. "At that point, it was just an academic interest, it was a curiosity."
Curiosity turned into a company. Pauli said they were awarded a $56,000 state grant to look into research and development of their quantum amplifier.
"When we started this, we thought we were going to be more of a mom-and-pop shop company, with two of us just kind of working on these things ourselves and making a couple of side hustle money, and then talking to the industry," Pauli said. "And talking to people at Mines and the Denver community made us realize the scalability of what we need to do and what we can accomplish is drastically higher than what we initially set out in our initial vision."
Bifrost Electronics has raised $4 million from seed round investments. Pauli said these funds give them a "runway of about 24 months" to scale out product development and manufacturing on an industrial scale.
"We need to have all of the resources available to us, and the last several weeks, we've been going through this process of purchasing all the equipment to scale up, making sure the orchestration was ready and that we're not running into any bottlenecks," Pauli said.
Throughout our interview with Pauli, he credited the School of Mines for helping bring this idea to light.
"It was just this hub for all of us with these ideas for this technology to have conversations, to share papers," he said. "It was like watercooler conversations that made this company happen. Casual conversations in the hallway and the classroom that these ideas took place and kind of grew up from there."
Frederic Sarazin, department head of physics and the director of quantum at Mines, said the school's quantum engineering program was one of the first in the nation.
"What makes us especially good for quantum, I would say, is because we have the right place at the right time," said Sarazin. "So if you think about quantum and quantum at the moment in Colorado, we probably have the largest concentration of quantum startups in the nation, and so we have this opportunity to basically develop the quantum workforce here at Mines."
Looking to the future, Sarazin said the School of Mines is looking to create a bachelor's degree in quantum engineering, which would also be one of the first in the nation.
