Hi there, Welcome to the 134th edition of Heartcore Insights, curated with 🖤 by the Heartcore Team. If you missed the past newsletters, you can catch up here. Now, let’s dive in! The Second Century of Quantum Won't Be Built in Silicon ValleyDriving back from Q2B Silicon Valley to the airport a month ago, I found myself surrounded by billboards. “Your AI SDR that never sleeps.” “Agentic workflows for enterprise.” “Deploy autonomous agents in minutes.” The usual Silicon Valley chorus. Meanwhile, inside the conference, John Preskill had just made a quiet but significant announcement: We are entering the second century of quantum. What will this second century bring? Preskill’s answer was ambitious – the wonders we encounter may far surpass those of the first century. Yet nobody on the highway seemed to notice. This was the final Q2B conference in Silicon Valley. Next year, it moves to Chicago. The quantum revolution, it seems, isn’t happening where the silicon revolution began. Things change. Where quantum is actually happeningThe policy landscape tells the story. According to the OECD, 18 OECD member countries plus the EU have now adopted dedicated national quantum strategies. Global governments have committed an estimated $55.7B to quantum science and technology since 2013. The momentum is accelerating. According to OECD, international quantum patent families grew sevenfold between 2005 and 2024 – a 20% compound annual growth rate, compared to just 2% for all technologies combined. The ECIPE quantum clusters ranking attempts to map where this activity concentrates, identifying 45 quantum clusters worldwide. The ranking places Cambridge, UK at #1, Helsinki, Finland at #2, Oxford, UK at #3. The ranking is directionally interesting, but I’d score some clusters differently. Chicago should rank significantly higher given the ecosystem forming there (hence the Q2B move). The Munich area and Delft deserve more prominence. Japan’s near-absence from the top rankings feels like a gap. Still, the report captures something important: the sheer breadth of places where quantum is being developed. This is not a one-city phenomenon. This distribution is significant. Quantum isn’t following the playbook of software or even AI, where winner-take-all dynamics concentrate innovation in a few zip codes. The physics is too hard, the talent too specialised, the infrastructure too demanding. Progress happens where deep research institutions, precision manufacturing and patient capital converge – and those conditions exist in many places.
The data on Europe is particularly striking. According to the IE CGC report on Europe’s quantum readiness, Europe is building what no single nation can – continent-wide quantum infrastructure through EuroQCS for computing and EuroQCI for secure communications. The report’s expert panel rates Europe’s quantum competitiveness at 3-4 out of 5, with a clear trajectory toward what they call “A Sovereign Quantum Europe” by 2040. From science to industryAs we argued in our earlier piece, the race isn’t about counting qubits, rather it is about building the infrastructure that will manufacture them at scale – and this is what the second century of quantum will be about. Conferences like the ISIG Quantum Computing Infrastructure Summit are now addressing exactly this: manufacturing, scalability and the path to commercialisation. The Quantum Insider reached similar conclusions. The question isn’t whether quantum will matter – it will. The question is where it will be built. Wherever you are based, there are likely researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs building quantum around you. If you are one of them – whether working on hardware, enabling infrastructure or the software stack that will connect it all – we’d love to talk. We can help connect you to the broader ecosystem and think through where this goes next. ~ Michael Baczyk, Investor, Heartcore Capital
🇪🇺 Notable European early-stage rounds
🇺🇸 Notable US early-stage rounds
🔭 Notable later stage rounds
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Tuesday, January 27, 2026
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