At IISc, Prof C M Chandrashekar's group has demonstrated a six-qubit photonic quantum system with deterministic quantum gate operations — a world first, per the team.
The IISc Quantum Technology Initiative and Quantum Research Park, supported by the Karnataka government, provide the institutional support.
Magnetometres On Submarines QuBeats, a Hyderabad-based startup, represents the part of the quantum technology spectrum that is closest to fielding operational systems.
The company is also working with DRDO's Solid State Physics Laboratory, where the Quantum Technology Research Centre was established in 2025.
Mangaonkar, from an earlier conversation, put it most succinctly: to be a quantum company today, you first have to be a photonics company.
Six researchers and founders building India’s quantum ecosystem describe what the National Quantum Mission has produced in 18 months — and what it will take to turn foundations into capability.
In 2021, Professor Umakant Rapol of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, wrote a proposal to establish a quantum technology hub. The money came through. But guess what also came through — the pandemic. The Section 8 company that was supposed to house the hub had to be incorporated in the middle of a national lockdown. IISER Pune had never run such a company before. "Initially, there was a lot of confusion as to how to go about it," Rapol says. Supply chains broke globally. Core laser systems ordered for the hub took a year and a half to arrive, on top of a six-month procurement cycle. Two years passed before the lab could begin serious work. Five years later, Rapol's group has trapped 25 calcium ions in vacuum and expects to deliver a 20-qubit ion-trap quantum computer by the end of 2026. The same lab has demonstrated a gravity sensor using atom interferometry — a technology with applications ranging from mineral exploration to underground tunnel detection to monitoring tectonic plate movement. The hub he built under the earlier National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems, with Rs 170 crore over five years, became the institutional scaffold on which the National Quantum Mission (NQM) would build. Rapol's own quantum research had been supported before that by DST's QuEST programme — Quantum-Enabled Science and Technology — an earlier initiative that seeded quantum research groups across the country and laid the groundwork for everything that followed. "One dovetails into the other," Rapol says. "The platforms that are being developed are like solid foundations. You can build a car, you can build a small pickup truck or an SUV. Building the foundations is something which is happening." The NQM was approved on 19 April 2023, with Rs 6,003 crore — about $735 million — allocated over eight years. It became operational in October 2024. In the roughly 18 months since funds began flowing, the mission has stood up four thematic hubs, funded 17 startups, coordinated 152 researchers across 43 institutions in 17 states and two Union territories, and supported work that has produced India's first full-stack quantum computer, a quantum diamond microscope, an indigenous high-precision diode laser, and the country's first quantum positioning system under a defence contract. A 1,000 km quantum-secured communication link has been demonstrated using indigenous technology. And a scientist at the Inter-University Accelerator Centre (IUAC) in Delhi is developing a quantum processor based on an unconventional platform — Penning traps — that could offer a fundamentally different approach to the field. This is what the mission has produced. How it has produced it — the institutional choices, the bureaucratic speed, the hardware bets, and the constraints that remain — is the story. Section 8 Companies And Ten-Day Approvals The four thematic hubs — quantum computing at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru; communication at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras with C-DOT; sensing and metrology at IIT Bombay; materials and devices at IIT Delhi — were each set up as Section 8 companies: not-for-profit but with corporate governance. The structure was deliberate. Indian science missions have a history of funds stalling in institutional overhead, procurement queues, and audit paralysis. A Section 8 company has corporate flexibility — it can take equity in startups, engage industry directly, and operate with faster decision-making than a university department. Equipment procurement for the research groups still flows through the host government institutions, but the General Financial Rules (GFR) reform and the hub's governance structure have eased the process considerably. The computing hub at IISc alone has Rs 653 crore in committed funding and draws on 52 researchers across 21 institutions. The mission coordinates its 152 researchers through a hub-spoke-spike model: hubs are the lead institutions, spokes are major research projects, spikes are individual research groups. Fourteen Technical Groups drive the research across all four verticals. The mission's targets are staged: intermediate-scale quantum computers with 20–50 physical qubits within three years, 50–100 within five, and 50–1,000 within eight; satellite-based quantum communication over 2,000 km; inter-city quantum key distribution over the same distance using trusted nodes; and quantum sensors including magnetometres, gravity sensors, and atomic clocks with 10⁻¹⁹ fractional instability. In 2025, the government eased the GFR, raising the global tender exemption for scientific equipment from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 50 lakh. Rapol says the difference has been transformative. "Now in the NQM, the things that I am procuring, they are going at a much faster pace because of that." The mission's speed on the startup side has been more striking still. Dr Sugam Kumar, a scientist at the IUAC in Delhi, founded a startup called QUTE Electronics in November 2025 to build precision power supplies for quantum computers. He approached NQM in February 2026. He submitted a proposal in the first week of March. "Within two days they replied that tomorrow we have your interview." He pitched the next day. The approval came within 10 days. "I never thought that they would respond so fast." The NQM now supports 17 startups, up from an initial cohort of eight. The NQM startup guidelines lay out a structured funding mechanism. Track 1 provides seed funding of up to Rs 5 crore for early-stage startups, with the T-Hub taking up to 4.5 per cent equity. Track 2 provides up to Rs 25 crore through equity-linked instruments for scaling and commercialisation, with the T-Hub as lead investor or co-investing alongside a venture capital firm. All support is milestone-linked: deliver, then receive the next tranche. Jay Mangaonkar of QuPrayog, an optical clock and frequency comb startup incubated at IISER Pune, says the first-stage NQM funding was sufficient for his frequency comb, and that further support has been promised once prototypes are demonstrated. He is encouraged by the direction of the second cohort. "There are more startups which are getting funds now. It's encouraging that the government is not only thinking about setting up things, but they also seem to be motivated on funding the backend — the electronics, the optics." Among the new entrants is GDQ Labs, founded by Mangaonkar's former PhD colleagues at IISER Pune, building quantum magnetometres for cardiac diagnostics — detecting faint magnetic signatures of the heart that conventional instruments miss. The Technology Development Board (TDB), acting as a second-level fund manager under NQM's Research, Development and Innovation framework, received over 100 proposals within two months of issuing a call. Six companies have been recommended by its investment committee.
India's quantum allocation is a tenth of China's. The mission's design is meant to compensate for the budget gap.
Four Platforms, Four Timelines The hardware being built under NQM spans four distinct platforms. Rapol's 20-qubit ion-trap quantum computer at IISER Pune, due by year-end, is one of the mission's flagship deliverables. The hub he built before NQM existed had already funded seven startups — including QNu Labs and QpiAI, two companies that would go on to produce the mission's most widely reported milestones — and runs spoke projects at TIFR, IIT Roorkee, and the Raman Research Institute. NQM did not start from zero; it built on institutional investments that were already producing results. At IUAC, Kumar is pursuing one of the more unconventional approaches in quantum computing. His group is developing a quantum processor based on a two-dimensional array of microfabricated planar Penning traps, where individual electrons are confined using static electric and magnetic fields. Unlike solid-state platforms, where qubits are fabricated inside circuits and typically exhibit coherence times in the microsecond range, trapped electrons in Penning traps are suspended in ultra-high vacuum and remain largely isolated from material environments. In principle, such systems can achieve coherence times extending to seconds or minutes — several orders of magnitude longer than many existing platforms. The platform is at an early stage. Kumar's group is developing its first seven-qubit chip, expected by September, with an initial multi-qubit demonstration targeted for December. The potential advantages are quantitative: current superconducting architectures may require 100 to 1,000 physical qubits to realise a single fault-tolerant logical qubit through error correction; in a Penning-trap system with much longer coherence times, that overhead could potentially drop below 10. "That makes a huge difference," Kumar says. Kumar credits IUAC's infrastructure — round-the-clock technical support, centralised fabrication facilities, immediate engineering assistance — with enabling the pace. "Even if somebody offered me a position at any well-known academic institution, I would prefer to stay at IUAC," he says. "For experimental work at this level, this kind of infrastructure is extremely difficult to find elsewhere." At IISc, Prof C M Chandrashekar's group has demonstrated a six-qubit photonic quantum system with deterministic quantum gate operations — a world first, per the team. Photonic quantum computing operates at room temperature, sidestepping the cryogenic infrastructure that makes superconducting systems expensive and import-dependent. The IISc Quantum Technology Initiative and Quantum Research Park, supported by the Karnataka government, provide the institutional support. At IIT Bombay, the Sensing and Metrology T-Hub has produced India's first quantum diamond microscope — an instrument that uses nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond to image magnetic fields at nanometre resolution. It has immediate applications in semiconductor failure analysis, neuroscience, and materials research — the kind of output that justifies a quantum mission to people outside quantum physics. The most consequential Indian quantum hardware company sits adjacent to the T-Hub architecture. QpiAI, a Bengaluru startup founded in 2019, unveiled India's first full-stack quantum computer — the 25-qubit Indus system — in April 2025. Its 64-qubit Kaveri chip followed in November. In March 2026, the company announced that a custom hardware decoder had cut error-correction decoding latency from 60 microseconds to 1.5 microseconds on the Kaveri processor. The company has raised $65.6 million in total funding and employs about 100 people. Its roadmap targets 1,000 qubits by 2030. Prof Prabha Mandayam of IIT Madras, one of the country's leading quantum error correction researchers, notes that there is insufficient technical documentation in the public domain to evaluate the decoder claim in detail — the code implemented, the number of error-correction cycles, and whether the data was collected from the actual chip are not publicly known. She would like to see Indian quantum startups publish technical documents or file patents, as their Western counterparts do, so that the wider research community can assess and build on the work. Dr Mrittunjoy Guha Majumdar — Adjunct Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), chair of the quantum information group at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham Delhi NCR, trained at MIT's Schwarzmann School of Computing, and a lead speaker at the NQM's strategic consultations on the quantum error correction vertical in 2023 — says the decoder result represents "a substantial step towards closing key latency and control-stack gaps," but India "remains at an earlier stage in terms of demonstrated fault-tolerant primitives" compared to Google, IBM, and Quantinuum.
The NQM is pursuing four distinct qubit platforms — each with different physics, different timelines, and a different kind of value.
Magnetometres On Submarines QuBeats, a Hyderabad-based startup, represents the part of the quantum technology spectrum that is closest to fielding operational systems. The company builds on a unified vapour-cell platform: a glass cell packed with rubidium atoms, probed with lasers, yielding magnetometry, gyroscopy, atomic timekeeping, and broadband RF sensing from the same physics. Rajat Sethi, the co-founder who handles strategy and defence engagement, frames the breadth carefully. "While from a product category, it might seem that these are very wide (product categories). But deep down, we are just playing with atomic vapour cells. The core setup and experiment remains the same." QuBeats won the Aditi 2.0 challenge with Rs 25 crore to build a quantum positioning system for the Indian Navy — a system that uses quantum magnetometres to navigate submarines without GPS. Sethi says the team has already begun visiting submarines, taking magnetometres into the field. "Three years of money is given for development and solution refinement. Most of it goes into field trials." The Indian Navy, he adds, "is one of the best organisations when it comes to adoption of innovation." The company is also working with DRDO's Solid State Physics Laboratory, where the Quantum Technology Research Centre was established in 2025. "We've won multiple tenders, we've surpassed a lot of listed companies in this space." In Aditi 4.0, QuBeats has pitched two further challenges: sovereign quantum radars, and distributed acoustic sensing using optical fibres for underwater surveillance. Chip-scale magnetometres and miniature atomic clocks — products with immediate civilian and automotive markets — are expected to be the first revenue generators. "Even the chip-scale magnetometres that we have fabricated ourselves — that in itself has a huge market because all automobiles require magnetometres, which are imported." Sethi connects the quantum supply chain to a much larger industrial gap. "We are looking at diode lasers and fibre optic lasers. That ability allows us to also go out and build laser weapons. This is the reason why the big defence players are unable to do anything in lasers other than possibly importing some Iron Dome components from Israel. Because that laser capability, that optics capability, is barely with 10-odd people." A Thousand Kilometres, With Caveats In April 2026, the government announced that India had demonstrated a 1,000 km quantum-secured communication network using indigenous technology developed by QNu Labs, a startup incubated at IIT Madras and funded under NQM. Department of Science and Technology (DST) Secretary Abhay Karandikar described it as progress ahead of schedule. The underlying technology is strong. QNu Labs' ARMOS platform was independently validated by VIAVI Solutions, a global leader in network test and measurement, using the industry-standard MAP-300 test platform. The validation confirmed secure key generation over 200 km of standard telecom fibre without signal amplification, with a quantum bit error rate below 4 per cent and generation rates of 8,000 bits per second at metro distances. The system uses a proprietary decoy-state Differential Phase Shift protocol and can coexist with 10 Gbps classical data traffic on the same fibre — a meaningful practical advantage. The 1,000 km distance was achieved by chaining multiple such links — the same trusted-node approach that China used for its Beijing-to-Shanghai QKD backbone. Each node every 200 km or so decodes and re-encodes the quantum signal, and the security of the whole system rests on the security of those nodes. The IIT Madras Communication T-Hub's own QKD work under NQM proceeds on the same principle. Prof Anil Prabhakar, who runs the experimental implementation, has demonstrated a field link from IIT Madras to its Research Park — a few kilometres — and encountered sliced fibres and signal leakage even over that short distance. The plan is to extend to Chennai-Bengaluru with two or three trusted nodes, then to Delhi. The hub is also developing quantum repeaters, which would eliminate the need for trusted nodes — but repeater technology has not been solved anywhere in the world. The mission also has a defensive dimension: protecting existing systems against future quantum threats. DRDO is leading projects on quantum-resilient encryption and quantum-safe cryptographic algorithms. The Society for Electronic Transactions and Security, under the Principal Scientific Adviser's office, has implemented post-quantum cryptography algorithms for FIDO authentication tokens and IoT security. And C-DOT — the same organisation partnering with IIT Madras on the communication hub — has developed quantum-secure video IP phones. This work is less visible than qubit counts but may be the first NQM output to touch everyday infrastructure. The Photonics Floor Every quantum founder interviewed for this piece identified the same binding constraint. Mangaonkar, from an earlier conversation, put it most succinctly: to be a quantum company today, you first have to be a photonics company. If you can fabricate your own lasers and optical components, everything else is integration. India cannot — yet. Frequency combs are manufactured by three or four companies globally, two German and one American. QuPrayog is building India's first, and hopes to achieve mode-locking by September. Titanium sapphire lasers are entirely imported from the United States (US), Germany, and Japan. Sethi is blunt about the import situation. "Right from vapour cells to these precision lasers to frequency combs — everything is under export control. Even if you want to import it, you will be given a 'no' in caps lock." Rapol reports that the export control environment is tightening. Components he has purchased routinely for 30 years — basic ultra-high-vacuum parts from US and European suppliers — now require detailed justifications. "This time, they came back and said, this is not enough, you have to write one paragraph about exactly what research you are doing." He sees the trajectory clearly. "That day is not far when they'll say, no, we cannot sell lasers to India." The Amaravati Quantum Valley — a separate Andhra Pradesh state initiative launched in April 2026 — offers the most granular picture of where India's quantum supply chain stands. Two quantum test facilities were assembled there in under eight months using contributions from seven organisations: quantum chips from IISc and TIFR, cryogenic cables from Dimira Technologies (an IIT Bombay startup), precision power supplies from QUTE Electronics, and control electronics from DRDO. The dilution refrigerator — the single most expensive and strategically sensitive component — was built by Sidwal Industries in partnership with QBit Force, using roughly 70 per cent Indian components. Kumar, who supplied QUTE's power supplies to the project, says the remaining 30 per cent were imported due to time constraints and will be replaced with Indian parts within months. PrenishQ, an IIT Delhi spin-off funded under NQM, demonstrated India's first indigenous high-precision diode laser in November 2025. But even full indigenisation of hardware hits a floor. "Even if you want to make lasers, solid state lasers," Rapol says, "we can make the enclosure, we can make the mechanical design, we can also design electronics. But at the end, you still have to import all the chips, the laser chip itself, which emits light." The semiconductor dependency runs beneath the quantum dependency. India's quantum stack rests, at its deepest layer, on someone else's silicon.
Four of the five segments of a superconducting quantum computer have been built with entirely indigenous components. The dilution refrigerator is the remaining gap.
