Alexa von Tobel is fully aware that her big bet on quantum computing may never pay off. “The risk of being too early is a real risk,” she says. She’s speaking to me via Zoom from the New York City office of Inspired Capital, the early-stage venture capital firm she runs with former US commerce secretary Penny Pritzker.
In addition to personally investing in blue-chip brands like Uber and Airtable, von Tobel has backed a number of AI startups through Inspired Capital, including BrightAI (a platform that monitors critical infrastructure) and PreemptiveAI (a startup building a foundation model to map human physiology and predict health outcomes). In total, the firm manages nearly $1 billion in assets.
In 2023, the Harvard-dropout-turned-founder-turned-VC and podcast host started studying quantum computing. In an interview with WIRED, she makes the case that this field will unlock the scientific discoveries more often associated with artificial general intelligence. Inspired Capital recently invested in a quantum startup called Logiqal, which is seeking to build the world’s first scaled quantum computer.
I suspect you knew about quantum computing for years before you decided to invest. What changed?
A few months before ChatGPT came out, Penny Pritzker and I went on a listening tour around AI where we connected with dozens of experts in the category. I came up for air after that and said, “What's the next innovation horizon after AI?” Because we're in AI. Everything is AI, there's nothing that we're touching that isn't AI anymore. It became clear to me—and I could always be wrong—that one of the next innovation curves very clearly could be quantum. AI's compute demands are going to reshape infrastructure, which means quantum has a greater likelihood of success.
If you talk to some of the best experts in the field, they would tell you there's only hundreds of quantum experts in the world. So it's kind of an amazing category to go learn about because actually you can't pretend to be a quantum expert. Quantum experts are PhDs with decades of work. So you can really put your hands around the talent in a way where you can really learn from them.
Today, we see a potential path toward building one of the first quantum computers. And I say quantum computers with an asterisk, because a quantum computer, even a quantum computer with 10,000 qubits, 50,000 qubits, 100,000 qubits, would begin to create a significant amount of value for society, but it wouldn't hit the bar of a perfect quantum computer, which is ideally hundreds of thousands of qubits.
Where did you ultimately decide to invest?
So I really focused on hardware, meaning we have to first build the first quantum computer before we can do anything else.
In many ways, we think of quantum unfolding in phases, and today it's really a hardware play. We need to get to a point where we can build successfully tens of thousands of qubits that fire and work successfully. So [then the question was] who is the most talented person that I could find in the hardware category? And it became very clear to me, it's this professor named Jeffrey Thompson at Princeton. And he was working on a breakthrough approach called erasure conversion in building one of the first quantum computer companies focused on the neutral atom using ytterbium.