The business press highlights the rise of the 22@ spin-off, led by Marta P. Estarellas. To address the lack of professionals, the company relies on collaborative research and the Industrial Doctorate Plan, where its co-founder Pol Forn-Díaz leads key projects for technological sovereignty.
The quantum computing revolution is taking shape in Barcelona, but it faces a global bottleneck: the lack of human capital. Recently, both La Vanguardia and L'Avui have focused on the success of Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech , the company that has managed to manufacture quantum computers that operate 365 days a year. Behind the turnover figures and the extreme cold technology, however, lies a talent recruitment strategy in which the Industrial Doctorate Plan (DI Plan) plays an important role.
According to La Vanguardia, the company already has a turnover of 5 million euros and works for critical sectors such as energy and logistics. However, growth is clashing with the reality of the job market. Marta P. Estarellas , CEO of the company, has been clear about the composition of its 75-person workforce: “It is difficult to find senior talent in a sector as innovative as this, and that is why we want to recruit students.”
Most of the team are young engineers and physicists fresh out of university. Some of them have been the subject of interviews conducted by Pla DI, which can be consulted on our website. The question is: how does this young talent transform into experts capable of building the most complex technology in the world?
The response to the CEO's call is materialized through the scientific connection provided by Pol Forn-Díaz, co-founder of the company and researcher at IFAE. As he explains to L'Avui, after returning from the USA it was clear to him that " building quantum computers using public funds was mission impossible " and that a company had to be created. But to maintain scientific excellence within the business environment, Forn-Díaz has used the DI Plan as a transfer and training tool.
In this sense, Forn-Díaz has collaborated with industrial doctorates as a company tutor and thesis director in projects that directly attack the technical challenges described by the press.
Among these projects, some work in the field of Quantum Annealers , what we could call the manufacturing of the “brain”. While the company seeks to solve optimization problems, the industrial PhD projects led by Forn investigate the construction of “quantum annealer” processors, which allow finding short-term solutions without the complexity of error correction of digital systems. The project “ Digital and Analog Quantum Computers ” (Finished) aimed to build a prototype of a few-qubit quantum annealer (less than 10). This project has demonstrated the feasibility of superconducting circuit technology to solve problems by continuously evolving the system towards its lowest energy state; the project “ Superconducting Flux Qubit Circuits for Quantum Annealing ” (Ongoing) is a recently started project in 2024, and seeks to perfect the technology to achieve a coherent annealer . The project studies state-of-the-art designs to increase coherence time, essential for the quality of the calculation.
Other projects work in the field of controlling cold and waves. La Vanguardia highlights the use of “refrigerators” at 200 degrees below zero and microchips. In particular, industrial doctoral projects such as “ Microwave technology for quantum processors ” have trained researchers in the engineering necessary to control these qubits in cryogenic environments.
In 2024, the collaboration with the DI Plan was renewed with the ongoing project on qubit flow circuits mentioned above, demonstrating that the recruitment of doctoral students is a continuous and not a one-time strategy.
This training of local talent is vital to the ultimate goal that Pol Forn highlights in L'Avui: European sovereignty. " The Americans and the Chinese are the first to develop this technology ," he warns, adding that " we cannot depend on the United States or China and be trapped with obsolete technology ."
Thanks to programs from the Generalitat such as the Industrial Doctorate Plan, Qilimanjaro not only "recruits students" as an emergency solution, but also trains them to lead a strategic industry from Catalonia, closing the circle between business need and academic excellence.
