Hrant Gharibyan

The Dispatch

Quantum, minus the hand-waving

In the spring of 2022, two Stanford alumni paddled out past the break at Santa Monica, sat up on their boards, and decided to build a company. There was no whiteboard, no pitch deck, no conference room. There was saltwater, an IBM Quantum press release about superconducting qubits, and a question that would not let go: the hardware was finally getting good, so where was the software that would let anyone actually use it?

That conversation became BlueQubit. Hrant Gharibyan is its co-founder and CEO; Hayk Tepanyan, who had worked on Google's infrastructure team, is its CTO. They are both Armenian, both Stanford, and both convinced that quantum computing has spent too long as a physics demonstration and not enough time as a tool people can buy.

BlueQubit sells what the industry has started calling QSaaS - quantum software as a service. In plain terms: a cloud platform that gives a company access to real quantum processors and to high-speed emulators that mimic them. You write an algorithm, you test it on GPU-backed simulators that the company says run up to 100 times faster than the usual options, and only when it works do you spend money on scarce quantum hardware. It is the unglamorous plumbing that turns a science project into a product.

From the inside of a black hole

Gharibyan did not arrive here by way of business school. He arrived by way of the most abstract corner of modern physics. He earned dual bachelor's degrees in physics and mathematics at MIT in 2014, then a master's and a PhD in physics at Stanford, finishing in 2019 under Leonard Susskind - one of the founders of string theory and, famously, one of the people who argued Stephen Hawking out of a position on what black holes do to information.

His doctorate sat at the seam between quantum information and quantum gravity. He worked on questions that sound like science fiction and read like equations: how information escapes a black hole, what the geometry of a wormhole has to do with the difficulty of decoding Hawking radiation, whether you can simulate superstring theory on a quantum computer. After Stanford he went to Caltech as an "It from Qubit" postdoctoral scholar in John Preskill's Institute for Quantum Information and Matter - the group that coined the term "quantum supremacy."

The headline from that period is a paper. Gharibyan co-authored a protocol sometimes called "teleportation by size" - a way of sending quantum information through a simulated traversable wormhole. It was the kind of result that physicists frame on the wall. Then something rarer happened: the Google Quantum AI team took a version of that idea and ran it on a real superconducting processor. A thought experiment about gravity became an experiment you could actually perform.

That is the through-line of his career. He is not interested in quantum computing as a metaphor. He wants the thing to run.

Building the proving ground

Most quantum startups sell promise. Gharibyan's instinct has been to sell proof, in public, where it can be checked. BlueQubit has leaned hard into the question of "quantum advantage" - the point at which a quantum computer does something a classical computer practically cannot - and refused to treat it as a marketing slogan.

The clearest example is the company's work on "peaked circuits," quantum circuits engineered to hide a secret bit string that should be easy for a quantum machine to find and hard for a classical one to recover. BlueQubit ran them on hardware including IBM's and Quantinuum's machines, then did something a press-release company would never do: it dared the world to break its own construction, attaching a 0.25 BTC bounty to anyone who could crack the hidden string with a classical algorithm. Quantum advantage, reframed as an open scoreboard - and a standing bet.

The customer work is just as concrete. BlueQubit has collaborated with DARPA on neutral-atom quantum computers and with the Honda Research Institute on quantum algorithms for image classification. The target markets it names are the ones where a small edge is worth real money: financial modeling, drug discovery, materials science, and visualization.

Why this matters now

In December 2024, BlueQubit raised a $10 million seed round led by Nyca Partners, with a roster of additional backers including Restive, Chaac Ventures, NKM Capital, Presto Tech Horizons, BigStory, Untapped Ventures, FormulaVC, and Granatus. For a company of roughly 18 people, it was a vote of confidence in a specific thesis: the hardware race has its giants - IBM, Google, Quantinuum - and the next opening is the layer that sits on top, the software that lets a non-physicist actually get value out of a qubit.

Gharibyan is unusually well placed to build that layer, precisely because he spent years on the other side of it. He knows where the abstractions leak. He has simulated matrix models and quantum chaos; he has watched a gravity calculation become a chip experiment. He has the rare profile of someone who can both write the algorithm and explain to a bank why it matters.

There is a quiet Armenian throughline too. The diaspora press has held BlueQubit up as evidence of a growing wave of Armenian founders in deep tech, and Gharibyan and Tepanyan have not shied away from that framing. It is a small country with an outsized tradition in mathematics and physics, and two of its sons are now building infrastructure for the most mathematical machine ever conceived.

The surfboard story gets retold because it is charming. But it is also a tell. Gharibyan tends to be wherever the abstract meets the physical - the wormhole that becomes a chip, the theory that becomes a product, the idea that comes to you somewhere you are not supposed to be working. He left one of the most prestigious perches in theoretical physics to do something far less certain. The bet is that quantum computing is finally ready to stop being a demonstration. He is building the part that decides whether he is right.