New Pasadena Startup Launches Quest to Build Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computer

A startup born out of the California Institute of Technology launched Monday with a research paper arguing that practical quantum computers could be built with a fraction of the hardware previously thought necessary — and with Pasadena as its home base.

Oratomic, a 14-person company led by scientists from Caltech, Harvard, Google, and other institutions, went public on March 31 alongside a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server claiming fault-tolerant quantum computers could require as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits. Previous estimates placed the threshold at one million or more, according to a Caltech news release and a press release issued by the company through PRNewswire.

The paper, titled “Shor’s algorithm is possible with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits,” describes a new error-correction architecture developed in collaboration with Caltech scientists. The approach reduces the number of physical qubits needed per logical qubit from roughly 1,000 to as few as five — a more than 100-fold reduction, according to the Caltech release. The results are theoretical.

“It is quite plausible, although not guaranteed, that we will have a fault-tolerant quantum computer by the end of the decade,” Dolev Bluvstein, Oratomic’s CEO and a visiting associate in physics at Caltech, said in the company’s press release.

Bluvstein completed his PhD in physics at Harvard, where he worked in the laboratory of Professor Mikhail Lukin on neutral-atom quantum computing. That work — pioneering error-corrected quantum algorithms using reconfigurable atom arrays — shared the Physics World 2024 Breakthrough of the Year.

Hsin-Yuan (Robert) Huang, an assistant professor of theoretical physics at Caltech, serves as chief technology officer. Huang is on leave from his Caltech faculty position to lead the company’s technology development, according to the university’s news release.

“I always considered theoretical research on the usefulness of large-scale quantum algorithms to only be of interest in the distant future,” Huang said in the Caltech release. “Our new study made me realize they might come true in the next few years.”

Manuel Endres, a professor of physics at Caltech and an Oratomic co-founder, leads the lab that in September 2025 assembled the largest qubit array ever created at the time — 6,100 neutral-atom qubits trapped in a grid by lasers — a record published in the journal Nature.

John Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech and director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, is also on the founding team. Preskill, who coined the term “quantum supremacy” in 2012, has worked on fault-tolerant quantum computing theory for decades.

“I’ve been working on fault-tolerant quantum computing longer than some of my coauthors have been alive,” Preskill said in the Caltech release. “Now at last we’re getting close.”

The company’s technology centers on neutral-atom quantum computing, in which individual atoms are trapped and manipulated by focused laser beams called optical tweezers. Unlike competing platforms based on superconducting circuits or trapped ions, neutral-atom systems allow qubits to be physically rearranged during computation. That flexibility enables more efficient error correction, according to the research team.

“Unlike other quantum computing platforms, neutral atom qubits can be directly connected over large distances,” Endres said in the Caltech release. “Optical tweezers can shuttle one atom to the other end of the array and directly entangle it with another atom.”

The paper’s co-first authors are Madelyn Cain, identified as Oratomic’s lead theoretical scientist, and Qian Xu, a Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech who is now an Oratomic research scientist. Other founding team members include Jackson Ellis, Simon Evered, Andrei Faraon, Robbie King, Harry Levine, Hannah Manetsch, Lewis Picard, and Nickolas Pilgram, according to the company’s press release.

Oratomic lists a Pasadena address with the ZIP code 91125, Caltech’s code. The company will work in close collaboration with Caltech’s Advanced Quantum Computing Mission, an on-campus interdisciplinary effort that will continue to study the fundamental science of quantum information processing, according to the university’s announcement. The Caltech team’s longer-term plan includes placing quantum “supercomputers” on campus for solving scientific problems.

A fault-tolerant quantum computer capable of running Shor’s algorithm could solve the mathematical problems underlying widely used encryption methods such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography, according to the company’s press release. Global guidelines call for transitioning to post-quantum encryption by 2035.

The company has not disclosed any outside funding or investment details as of its launch date. Research at Caltech was funded by the university, with additional support from the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, the NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes program, and the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, according to the Caltech release.

“We gathered some of the world’s top experts in the topic at Caltech to put all the pieces together,” Bluvstein said in the Caltech release. “What we came up with — a clear road map to building a quantum computer — came faster than we expected.”