Ilyas Khan, the British Pakistan founder of Quantinuum, became a billionaire in the company’s IPO on NASDAQ last week. Khan is a pioneer in the revolutionary field of quantum computing which could speed up computing by orders of magnitude. It will have a huge impact in AI and encryption. Dr. Irfan Siddiqui, a Pakistani-American professor of Physics at University of California at Berkeley, is another top expert in quantum computing. 

Ilyas Khan, British Pakistani Founder of Quantinuum. Source: 2023 BLOOMBERG FINANCE LP

Quantinuum raised $1.68 billion in an initial public offering last week, making its founder Illyas Khan a billionaire, according to Forbes. The listing, which is the largest to date for a quantum startup, valued Quantinuum at over $15.6 billion after it sold 28 million shares at $60 each on June 3. Its shares opened at $58 per share on June 9. Khan, who owns around 15% of the company, is now worth $2.2 billion. Quantinuum uses new type of quantum computer; rather than running on silicon chips, it instead uses ions trapped in place with lasers to execute computations. 

Ilyas Khan is the founder and former CEO of Cambridge Quantum, which merged with Honeywell's quantum division to form Quantinuum, now regarded as a global leader in quantum technologies valued at over $15 billion. He is involved directly in Pakistan's technology sector, where he provides guidance on integrating high-level quantum technologies into Pakistan's growing tech infrastructure.

Dr. Irfan Siddiqui, Professor at UC Berkeley

In quantum computing, a qubit or quantum bit is the basic unit of quantum information—the quantum version of the classical binary bit physically realized with a two-state device. Here's how Dr. Siddiqui explained quantum computing in an interview with Design News:

"For me, any quantum technology, including quantum computing, is something that takes advantage of entanglement. And entanglement is the idea that if you have different pieces of matter and you put them together, they behave as a single unit. So, for example, each of the bits in a classical computer are independent of each other. If you flip one, it doesn't affect the one next to it. In a quantum computers all of these bits have correlation with each other so they're all tied together like one big mass. In fact, the number of states that they can occupy is exponentially larger because of these linkages between neighboring elements. Quantum computing is the science of manipulating this entangled set of bits for some particular problem of interest in either fundamental science and computation or to do a simulation of the natural world."

Four of Ten Pakistani-American Founders of Unicorns

Pakistanis' footprint in the western tech ecosystem. Ten Pakistani immigrants are included among founders or co-founders of unicorns in America, according to  a recent study by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). A unicorn is a startup with a valuation of at least one billion U.S. dollars. Immigrant entrepreneurs of US unicorns are diverse, hailing from 76 different countries. India, with 96 companies, is the leading country of origin for the immigrant founders of U.S. billion-dollar companies. Immigrants from Israel founded the second-most billion-dollar companies with 60, followed by the United Kingdom (47), China (41), Canada (30), Russia (23), France (21), Germany (18), Ukraine (16), Australia (14), Pakistan (10) and Romania (10). Some companies were founded by entrepreneurs from the same country or immigrants from multiple countries.

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