Quantum AI accelerator opens in S’pore, boosting the Republic’s hub ambitions

SINGAPORE – Singapore has drawn its first quantum AI start-up growth investor to its shores, giving its ambition to lead in the frontier technology a boost.

Qai (pronounced kai) Ventures Singapore, backed by a Switzerland-based venture fund, made its official debut on Oct 29 at the Singapore Week of Innovation & Technology (Switch).

The outfit will play growth catalyst by helping start-ups through mentorship and a fixed programme, as well as being a venture builder in building new start-ups from scratch.

It announced plans to register seven new ventures here by 2027, while drawing on its network of business partners, academia and young enterprises to shore up the local ecosystem.

The firm hosted its first global hackathon here last week, and has been taking applications from Oct 29 for a five-month programme to help start-ups take their ideas closer to investment-ready concepts, and to investors.

It is promising each successful start-up up to $200,000 in funding during the programme and up to US$2 million (S$2.6 million) in funding subsequently.

Qai plans to register three of the seven promised ventures here in 2026 and another four in 2027, built on local research and intellectual property (IP) or from its proprietary ownership of 2,000 patents.

It is also turning to investors and family offices here to help it raise US$150 million in capital.

Quantum AI, which includes the application of quantum technology to improve AI’s performance and vice versa, has the promise to solve complex problems that current technology cannot yet do, such as cancers and global warming. Scientists estimate quantum computers to be 13,000 times faster than supercomputers.

Qai, drawn to Singapore by Enterprise Singapore (EnterpriseSG) with a grant and network assistance, chose the Republic to open its four-member office after a year-long assessment that included India, Taiwan, Japan and Australia.

Its office in Battery Road is its Asia-Pacific base and its fifth office worldwide, after Switzerland, the US, Canada and Japan.

Speaking to The Straits Times at Switch, Qai’s chief executive Alexandra Beckstein said it considered the strength of local academia, government funding and investments in infrastructure in choosing where to set up base.

EnterpriseSG’s executive director for start-up ecosystem Sophia Ng said having Qai here could help start-ups take their ideas from laboratory to market more quickly.

Singapore has invested in quantum technology since 2002, with past research funding of $400 million and

a recent $300 million commitment

announced in 2024.

At a panel discussion with Ms Beckstein, executive director of Singapore’s National Quantum Office Ling Keok Tong said the Government plans in 2026 to get the top three to five companies in each identified strategic sector to form teams to develop quantum computing proof-of-concepts.

These sectors include finance, biopharma and life sciences, and chemicals and materials sciences.

Singapore’s quantum strategy counts on having good infrastructure, talent, firms to productise concepts, and end-user companies to deploy them.

“All these have to come together,” he said.

Dr Ying Chen, director at the centre for quantitative finance at the National University of Singapore, said researchers get hampered by gaps in funding and engineering support, or IP ownership issues, when commercialising their ideas. There is also a lack of the entrepreneur mindset.

“Our researchers are trained to publish papers. But I think this can be addressed by working closely with deep-tech ventures like Qai,” she said.

Dr Rajeeb Hazra, chief executive of quantum computing firm Quantinuum, said quantum AI makes the intelligence part of AI more powerful and over time, less artificial, more trustworthy and more useful.

It will address problems where humans have not yet come to understand, such as in chemistry and material science.

“We are also looking at problems of data optimisation... applying quantum principles and quantum algorithms to data and visualising data in fundamentally different ways, using resources much more efficiently.”

While the jury is out on some scientists’ predictions that quantum computing could become mainstream by the early 2030s, in a way similar to what ChatGPT did for generative AI in 2022, many experts agreed the technology has reached an inflection point.

Mr Ling said five years from now, in 2030, firms that are not in the quantum space would get worried when they see early movers turning the technology to their benefit.

He hopes then, that there will also be momentum to bring the whole economy on board quantum computing.

The technology is currently generating a lot of excitement and interested investor money, he said.

Ms Beckstein, whose firm has made 27 investments in the area, cited an example of a UK Oxford-based start-up being valued at more than a billion dollars by an acquirer who is banking on the future use of its technology.

Oxford Ionics, a quantum computing spinout from the University of Oxford, was acquired by US quantum computing firm IonQ in a deal valued around US$1.075 billion earlier in 2025.

“What’s happening now is that the bigger players are starting to acquire the small players. And there are lots of crazy numbers that we see,” she said.