Welcome to the 77th episode of “Decode Quantum”. We continue our “international episodes”, this times with the cofounders of the US startup SEEQC,John Levy (CEO) and Oleg Mukhanov (CTO), who are creating superconducting control electronic circuits for solid state qubits. They are the only company in that field. We had a chance to meet our two guests in Elmsford in February this year and visit their lab and cleanroom.
John Levy is the CEO and cofounder of SEEQC in 2019. Beforehand, he was the chairman of Hypres, the company that spun-out SEEQC for reasons he’ll explain later. He was involved in various startups, like goTenna, and BioLite. He has been an investor and executive in the tech industry, having co-founded and led the tech practice at the venture capital firm L Capital Partners where he served on boards of over twelve tech companies. John took 3 companies public and oversaw numerous M&A transactions. During the 1990’s he co-founded the computer vision company ePlanet which spun out of Interval Research, sponsored by Paul Allen, and ran the company for Intel, its main investor. John is a graduate of the Harvard Business School.
Oleg Mukhanov, is a cofounder and the CTO of SEEQC. He was before the CTO of Hypres since 1991, where he led developments in superconducting electronics. Oleg is a co-inventor of the Rapid Single Flux Quantum (RSFQ) technology, a superconducting circuit used for high-speed, energy-efficient computation useful for both classical and quantum processors. He did his PhD in Russia with Konstantin Likharev in the late 1980s, at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU), before moving to the US at the end of the USSR.