On 17–18 November, the World Quantum Cannes Festival will bring researchers, founders, investors, industry leaders, and policymakers to the Palais des Festivals for two days focused on the transition from quantum research to commercial and industrial deployment. Its programme spans scientific advances, enterprise applications, investment, and the infrastructure required to build a viable quantum economy.
Among the speakers is Dr Owen Lozman, Managing Partner at 55 North, a Copenhagen-based venture firm investing exclusively across the quantum technology stack. A chemist by training, Lozman spent more than two decades in industrial R&D and technology commercialization before moving into venture capital, where he has backed companies across quantum computing, semiconductors, advanced materials, and other deep-tech fields.
Lozman also sits on the festival’s Honorary Committee and is among the investors supervising its closed-door Investor Day, which will examine how capital, corporate demand, and industrial capacity can move quantum technologies from technical progress towards scalable businesses. Ahead of the event, we spoke with him about what makes emerging science investable, where commercial progress in quantum is already visible, and what Europe must do to build companies that can compete globally.
What first drew you to investing in technologies whose potential can take years, sometimes decades, to materialize?
I came to investing through science and industrial R&D, rather than through finance. My background is in chemistry, and before venture capital I spent years working on advanced materials and their commercialization. That shaped how I think about technology: understanding why something works is important, but understanding what it takes to manufacture it, integrate it, and persuade someone to buy it is equally important.
What attracts me is the point where a scientific capability starts to become an industrial possibility. There is usually a period when the science is credible, but the company, supply chain, and market still need to be built. That is where a technically informed investor can make a real contribution.
But I would distinguish between a technology taking decades to reach its full potential and a company taking decades to create value. Those are not the same thing. You can invest in a long-term transition while backing businesses that achieve meaningful technical and commercial milestones along the way.
For me, the attraction has never been waiting patiently for the distant future, which is why I prefer to use the term “long-term, impatient capital.” It is about identifying what can be built now to make that future possible, and driving hard for returns.
What does your investment process look like, and what gives you conviction in a team?
We work backwards from the commercial outcome and forwards from the physics. The investment becomes interesting when those two paths meet.
From the technical side, we ask what has been demonstrated, under what conditions, and what remains unproven. We look closely at the assumptions behind scaling: fabrication yield, control complexity, interconnects, reliability, and the resources required to deliver useful performance.
From the commercial side, we ask who the customer is, what problem they are solving today, and why this product would be worth adopting. Then we connect the two through a financing plan: what does the next round of capital prove, and does that proof make the company materially more valuable?
The team is central. I look for scientific depth combined with intellectual honesty. Can the founders explain where their approach may fail? Do they understand the strongest competing approach? Are they willing to change the implementation without losing sight of the objective?
A credible team can distinguish what it knows, what it believes, and what it still needs to test.
Long development cycles do not remove the need for discipline. They make it more important. “Impatient capital” should still be milestone-driven capital.
Where have expectations moved ahead of reality, and where is progress underestimated?
Expectations run ahead of reality when a scientific milestone is presented as evidence that broad commercial usefulness is just around the corner.
An impressive benchmark is not automatically a useful application. A customer ultimately cares about the whole workflow: accuracy, runtime, cost, reliability, and how the result compares with the best available classical alternative.
At the same time, I think scepticism can underestimate the significance of progress in error correction. Google’s published work demonstrated below-threshold surface-code memories, with logical errors falling as the code became larger. That is an important result because it tests a central requirement for scalable, fault-tolerant computing. It is not the same as demonstrating an economically useful application.
Both statements can be true: the engineering progress is substantial, and the commercial destination remains demanding.
The mistake is to force everything into either “quantum is here” or “quantum is hype.” A better question is: which uncertainty has this result removed, and what uncertainty remains?
What would convince you that quantum has reached a genuine commercial inflection point?
My simplest answer is customers coming back because the product works, rather than because they want to learn about quantum.
I would watch for three things.
First, independently credible performance on a commercially relevant task, compared with a strong classical baseline. Not a convenient baseline, and not a comparison that ignores the rest of the workflow.
Second, repeat purchasing and deployment beyond an innovation team. A paid pilot is useful evidence. A renewal, expansion, or operational dependency is much stronger evidence.
Third, improving delivery economics. Can the supplier install and support the product repeatedly? Does every customer require a new research project, or is there a product that becomes easier to deliver as the business grows?
Those signals will appear at different times across the industry. An enabling-technology supplier or a sensing business may reach a commercial inflection point without waiting for a large, fault-tolerant computer.
That is why I would not look for one universal “quantum moment.” I would look for a sequence of markets becoming commercially real.
What does Europe need to do differently, and how can smaller ecosystems contribute?
Europe has a clear opportunity to be a significant contributor to and producer of quantum technology, rather than simply a sophisticated buyer of systems developed elsewhere.
For me, that means connecting research excellence to four things: growth capital, demanding customers, the infrastructure needed to build reliable products, and an exit market—private or public—that can allow the winners to remain and flourish in Europe.
We need financing that can support companies through industrialization, not only formation. We need procurement that gives credible young suppliers a route to reference customers, with clear performance requirements. And we need accessible fabrication, packaging, testing, and integration capabilities.
We also need to resist organizing the industry as a collection of separate national projects. A company should be able to assemble the best capabilities across Europe and sell globally.
Smaller ecosystems can contribute enormously without reproducing the entire stack. A specialist team can become internationally important in one critical capability—photonics, control electronics, materials, sensing, or software.
For ecosystems in Central and Eastern Europe, I would focus less on declaring a national quantum champion and more on connecting existing scientific and engineering strengths to real industrial demand.
European leadership does not require every component to be European. It does require European companies to own valuable technology, customer relationships, and meaningful positions in the supply chain.
What conversations should happen at Investor Day, and what would make it a success?
The festival brings investors, industry, and quantum companies together, and I am part of the Honorary Committee supervising Investor Day. I would like to use that setting for conversations that are harder to have on a public stage.
One is about the gap between technical roadmaps and financing plans. Which milestones genuinely reduce risk? Who funds the engineering work between a successful prototype and a product that can be delivered reliably?
Another is about customers. What would make a corporate buyer move from an exploratory project to a meaningful purchase? What performance, integration, and procurement conditions need to be met?
And I would like an honest discussion about Europe’s industrial priorities. Which capabilities are strategically important to retain? Where should we collaborate internationally? Where would concentrating resources achieve more than spreading them across competing initiatives?
The value of a closed-door discussion is not that people can make bigger claims, but that they can be more precise about what is difficult—and commit to doing something about it.