What is Pathfinder?
Pathfinder is a quantum manufacturing company.
Our thesis is that the next major advances in quantum computing will come from precision manufacturing capability, because every architecture is ultimately limited by the tools used to build it. Our objective is not to design an ideal quantum computer and only then determine how to manufacture it; our objective is to design the machines that make the machines.
This is a similar principle to SpaceX’s “idiot index”: the ratio between the cost of a finished component and the cost of its raw materials.
We believe lowering the industry’s aggregate idiot index will increase the rate at which ideas can be tested.
Cheaper components make cheaper experiments, cheaper experiments make it possible to test more ideas, more ideas tested means faster iteration, and faster iteration means faster progress.
So rather than optimise for any single design, we optimise for the rate at which designs can improve.
How Pathfinder Works
Pathfinder is an in-person organisation registered in the UK. For the first year or two, the company will consist of a small workshop and a small laboratory where we will decompose a quantum computer into every capability required to build it (lasers, vacuum systems, fabrication, packaging) and ask: “where is the idiot index highest, and can we do anything about it?”
We expect the work to regularly move between disciplines. Some months may be spent redesigning an optical system, others may be spent trying to reduce the cost of a laser assembly, understanding a fabrication process, or talking to suppliers.
The pre-seed round will be a success when we can identify one accepted manufacturing bottleneck and demonstrate that it can be substantially undercut or removed entirely.
Who Pathfinder Needs
Pathfinder needs people with strong technical credibility either in frontier quantum hardware or in the manufacturing systems that make it. That might mean trapped ions, quantum optics, integrated photonics, precision lasers and FPGA control systems, vacuum technology, semiconductor fabrication, advanced materials, lithography steppers, MOCVD reactors, ultra-precision optics, CNC machine tools, or CMOS foundries.
More importantly we are looking for people who have spent enough time around these machines that they already know which parts are unnecessarily expensive, unnecessarily slow, or unnecessarily difficult to manufacture.
Our ideal candidate is an engineer who has been quietly thinking for three years: ‘This assembly is absurd. We could build this in half the time if we just changed X, Y and Z.’
If reading this made you think of five manufacturing problems you’ve wanted to solve for years, let’s talk.