Itamar Sivan and the art of being on time

Itamar Sivan was worried he was getting old. He was still doing his military service. The great mathematicians, he had heard, made their breakthroughs before twenty-five, and a job as a bureau chief seemed an unnecessarily circuitous route to understanding the universe. So he began undergraduate studies at the Open University while serving. The day after his discharge, he flew to Paris.

There is something pleasing about this itinerary: a young physicist, anxious about wasting time, choosing a city with considerable expertise in wasting it beautifully. Sivan went to continue his studies at the École Normale Supérieure. Physics mattered. So did the opportunity to live in Paris while he was young. The future chief executive of Quantum Machines apparently saw no reason to choose between the two.

Years later, he would build a business around a rather different kind of timing. Quantum processors need instructions, measurements and responses coordinated with exacting speed. Sivan and his co-founders chose to supply the systems that do that work. Their customers could pursue different kinds of quantum hardware; Quantum Machines would help them operate it. The impatient student had found an industry where delay was an engineering problem.

A physicist learns to ask who will pay

Sivan was born in Tel Aviv in 1987. His interest in quantum mechanics began in high-school physics, before he had the mathematics to accompany the ideas. He later recalled an early feeling of understanding, followed by the discovery that he understood rather less than he thought. It is an agreeable qualification for experimental science: enough confidence to begin, enough evidence to reconsider.

He earned his BSc and MSc in physics at the École Normale Supérieure. Work on his master's thesis took him to Oxford and quantum optics. At the Weizmann Institute of Science, he completed a doctorate in Moty Heiblum's laboratory, studying quantum electronics and microfabrication. In 2015, he received the institute's John F. Kennedy Prize for academic excellence.

His publication record includes work on an electronic quantum eraser and electron pairing in the quantum Hall regime. These are reminders that his familiarity with quantum physics predates the investor presentation. He had worked on the experimental questions, with their inconvenient apparatus and stubborn results, before making the case that a company could help the field advance.

At Weizmann, another interest grew alongside the research. Sivan co-founded and ran an entrepreneurship program. Yonatan Cohen, his future co-founder, was involved in bringing scientists into contact with startup thinking. Teaching entrepreneurship meant asking a question that a beautiful experiment does not necessarily answer: who needs this enough to buy it?

That question became part of their own search. By the time Sivan, Cohen and Nissim Ofek founded Quantum Machines in 2018, they were looking for an unmet need within a developing industry. Quantum processors were attracting attention and investment. The founders saw an opening in the machinery required to control them. They could pursue a business while helping other teams pursue their processors.

“I never give up.”

Itamar Sivan, in his LinkedIn biography

The interesting part between the parts

Quantum computing has a gift for drawing attention to the qubit. The control system has a less photogenic assignment: make the experiment run. A processor must receive carefully shaped signals, return measurements and sometimes have its next operation adjusted in response. Software and electronics have to cooperate closely enough for those instructions to remain useful.

In a 2021 explanation of the business, Sivan described quantum logic arriving at a processor through electromagnetic pulses. Quantum Machines' proposition was to make that pulse-level work programmable. Its OPX hardware and QUA programming language gave researchers a way to describe and execute experiments, including decisions made while an experiment was running. The product connected the physicist's intention to the processor's next action.

For a founder, this was a consequential choice of customer. Quantum Machines could sell to the organizations developing quantum computers: companies, university groups and government laboratories. In 2021, Sivan described customers in more than ten countries. The business had a task to perform while the wider field was still working toward useful machines.

There is a familiar temptation in a young industry to promise the entire future. Sivan's approach gives the future a purchase order. A laboratory needs to conduct an experiment today, regardless of when a quantum computer will deliver a commercially important calculation. Supplying that laboratory creates a more immediate relationship between scientific progress and revenue.

An Austrian email, then a customer

One early route to market began with an email from an Austrian professor. His group was assembling a consortium for QuantERA, the European research funding network, and invited Quantum Machines to join. The company did not yet have customers. Participation gave its founders sustained contact with academics who were working on related problems.

Some of those researchers became early customers. Sivan has described the relationships as a turning point, valuable beyond the grant itself. The example makes his view of collaboration concrete. A consortium put people into a working relationship; the working relationship created opportunities for adoption. The commercial connection grew from spending time on shared scientific problems.

Another QuantERA relationship involved the Danish company QDevil, which Quantum Machines later acquired. Sivan credited their project work with opening the channel between them. For someone selling coordination inside a computer, he pays considerable attention to coordination outside it. The analogy only travels so far, but the recurring preference is clear: build a structure in which people can actually work together.

Give the quantum computer some classical company

In March 2023, NVIDIA and Quantum Machines announced DGX Quantum. The system paired NVIDIA's Grace Hopper computing platform with Quantum Machines' OPX+ controller. The announcement specified a connection designed for sub-microsecond latency between GPUs and quantum processing units. Behind the product name sat a practical concern: the classical side needed to keep pace with the quantum side.

The collaboration brought Sivan's company into a broader computing conversation. Quantum control, calibration, error correction and hybrid algorithms require classical resources as well as a quantum processor. DGX Quantum put those resources into a closely connected arrangement. For a company founded around a neglected layer, it was a conspicuous demonstration of where that layer belonged.

A year later, Quantum Machines opened the Israeli Quantum Computing Center at Tel Aviv University, with backing from the Israel Innovation Authority. Announced in June 2024, the center brought quantum systems, control equipment and high-performance computing into a facility intended for outside researchers and developers. Access was part of the point.

Sivan's argument was straightforward. Researchers cannot make efficient progress if working with a system requires a long journey followed by a narrow appointment. Experiments need repetition, calibration and revision. A center with equipment available to a broader community could reduce the amount each group had to build before beginning its own work. The infrastructure supplier was helping supply a place to experiment.

The company grows. The question gets harder.

In February 2025, Quantum Machines announced a $170 million Series C led by PSG Equity, with participation from Intel Capital, Red Dot Capital Partners and existing investors. Total funding reached $280 million. The company also said its technology was used by more than half of companies developing quantum computers worldwide. That adoption figure is the company's claim, rather than a census of the industry.

Money and customer numbers change the chief executive's assignment. In a France Alumni video, Sivan discussed the difficulty of moving from a small startup to a larger global organization. Adapting becomes harder as a company adds people, customers and revenue. He emphasized motivation, a capable team and flexibility. The physicist who once studied the behavior of electrons now has to think about the behavior of organizations.

The international footprint continued expanding in 2026. Quantum Machines acquired TU Delft spin-out QHarbor, followed six weeks later by Hungary's PCB Engineering. The June announcement described a new Budapest research and development hub and employees across twenty-two countries. These were company developments under Sivan's leadership, adding engineering capacity to the control business he had helped establish.

His technical argument also kept evolving. In March 2026, Sivan introduced the company's Open Acceleration Stack, designed to connect quantum processors with different classical accelerators. He described an architecture in which GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs and specialized chips could participate in tightly coordinated workflows. The ambition remained recognizable: make the surrounding system capable enough for researchers to attempt more demanding work.

A future with room for a question mark

Sivan can speak expansively about what quantum computing might change. His TEDx talk, published in 2021, asked audiences to imagine how difficult future technology would be for someone from a much earlier civilization to anticipate. The comparison allows for possibility without pretending to possess a complete catalogue of tomorrow's inventions.

He also asks awkward practical questions. Discussing quantum machine learning, he has pointed to the problem of getting data into a computation: speeding up the calculation helps little if preparing its input consumes an unreasonable amount of time. It is a useful habit in an industry so often described through the speed of its eventual answers.

In an October 2026 conversation with investor Rona Segev, Sivan returned to the decision to leave academia and the company's development since 2018. The path now includes researchers, investors, chip makers and computing infrastructure companies. His own contribution began with choosing a place among them where something necessary was missing.

The young student who boarded a plane for Paris wanted time for physics and time for a life. The founder has spent years working on another timing problem: how to make promising parts work together soon enough to accomplish something. Quantum computing still has plenty to prove. Sivan has given himself a definite job while it does.