Team

We are proud of having an international and multidisciplinary team that makes Qilimanjaro a source of not only science and technology, but also of great talent.

Our people have the opportunity to work in a cutting edge and motivational environment.

Leadership

Extensive CEO & Board Chair experience of high tech startups

Senior Executive and VicePresident roles at Hewlett Packard, SGI, 3Com and PerkinElmer

PhD Physics at UB and MBA at ESADE

Víctor Canivell
Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer

Group Leader, Quantum Computing Technology group at IFAE

Experimental physics, expert in superconducting qubits

PhD Physics - TU Delft MIT, Caltech and IQC Waterloo

Pol Forn-Díaz
Co-Founder & Chief Hardware Architect

Group Leader, QUANTIC group at BSC

Theoretical physics, expert in quantum algorithms, ML

PhD Physics at ICFO UNY/Stony Brook

Artur Garcia Sáez
Co-Founder & Chief Software Architect

M&A advisor in domestic and international deals

Founder of ArsCorporate and Ars.Legal

UAB, EADA, IESE

Jordi Blasco
Co-Founder & Chief Financial & Legal Officer

Research Professor at IFAE

World expert in Particle Physics and Astroparticle Physics

PhD in Physics - UB

Manel Martínez
Chief Technology Officer

 

Senior Software Lead and Consulting Manager in digital identity

Postgraduate in Quantum Engineering - UPC

MBA - ESADE & Stern NYU

BSc in Computer Science - UPC

Albert Solana
Business Developer Manager

Theoretical physicist and computer engineer, with a focus on quantum computer architectures and compilation methods

PhD Physics - University of York (UK) National Institute of Informatics (Japan)

NII, YCQT, UIB, UOC

Marta P Estarellas
Chief Product Officer and Team Manager

Experimental condensed matter physicist, with focus on quantum hardware and nanofabrication

Postgraduate in SC qubit hardware - UQ and ENS de Lyon

PhD Physics - TU Delft

Daniel Szombati
Senior Quantum Engineer

 

Quantum Engineer with focus on hardware and control

Final year PhD in Quantum Computing - TU Delft

MSc in Physics

Ramiro Sagastizabal
Senior Quantum Engineer

 

Former Communications Officer and Data Analyst in scientific and non-scientific institutions

MSc in Science Communication - UPF

BSc in Physics - UB

Alícia Labián
Corporate Operations Manager

Advisors


Rami Barends


Stefano Carrazza


Fabio Gallo


Jose Ignacio Latorre


Arkady Fedorov

Team

Former CEA Saclay researcher

MSc in Nanophysics and Advanced Materials - UCM

BSc in Physics - UCM

María Benito
Quantum Engineer

MSc in Quantum Science and Technologies - UB

BSc in Physics - UBo

Josep Bosch
Quantum Engineer

MSc in Condensed Matter Physics - Ocean University of China

BSc in Applied Physics - China University of Petroleum

Yifei Chen
Quantum Engineer

Former Communications and Marketing coordinator and Collaborator in EU Media Policy

PhD. in Audiovisual Communication and Media Policy-UAB

BsC in International Communications-Hanze Groningen

Andreea Costache
Project & Comms Officer

PhD student at IFAE

MSc Elementary Particle Physics - U Salento

BSc Elementary Particle Physics - U Salento

Annalisa De Lorenzis
Quantum Engineer

Former Software Engineer at Quside, Barcelona

MSc in Photonics - UAB, UB, UPC & ICFO

BSc in Physics - UAB

Joel Pérez Díaz
Quantum Engineer

Associate professor at UAB

Former RF/MW R&D product engineer at IDNEO technologies

Msc in Telecommunications - UAB

BSc Telecommunication electronics - UAB

David Eslava
Quantum Engineer

MSc in Quantum Science and Technology - UB

BSc in Physics - UV

Catalin Giurgea
Quantum Engineer

KIT former researcher

MSc in Physics Engineering - Uni Coimbra

BSc in Physics Engineering - Uni Coimbra

Fabio Henriques
Quantum Engineer

MSc in Nanotechnology - Chalmers U

BSc in Engineering Physics - UPC

Paul Jamet
Quantum Engineer

PhD student in the QCT group - IFAE

MSc in Advanced Physics - UB

BSc in Physics - UB

David López
Quantum Engineer

Undergraduate researcher at ICCUB

MSc student in Quantum Science and Technology - UB

BSc in Theoretical Physics - UB

Jan Nogué
Quantum Engineer

MSc in Physics of Complex Systems - IFISC-UIB

BSc in Physics - UCM

Ana Palacios
Quantum Engineer

Technology consulting analyst at Accenture

MSc in Artificial Intelligence - UPC/UB/URV

BSc in Physics Engineering - UPC

Jordi Riu
Quantum Engineer

Former lead developer at Air-Fi

MSc in High Energy Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology - UAB, IFAE

BSc in Physics - UAB

Javier Sabariego
Quantum Engineer

MSc in Information and Computer Sciences - Uni Lu

MSc in Astrophysics and Space sciences - UB

BSc in Physics - UB

Victor Sanchez
Quantum Engineer

MSc in Quantum Computing and Quantum Technologies - DUTH, NCSR Democritus

MSc in Space Science - UOP, NOA

BSc in Computer Science - UOP

Vyron Vasileiadis
Quantum Engineer

Former Machine Learning Scientist at dida Datenschmiede, Berlin

MSc - C.v.O. - FU Berlin

BSc in Physics - University of Oldenburg

Matthias Werner
Quantum Engineer

PhD student in the QCT group - IFAE

MSc in Applied Physics - TU Berlin

BSc in Physics - KIT

Fabian Zwiehoff
Quantum Engineer

We are international_

Our team joins us from all over the globe to bring us their quantum expertise.

We are international_

Our team joins us from all over the globe to bring us their quantum expertise.

Victor Canivell

Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer

Victor is a quantum physics PhD with a thirty year successful track record as an executive in the IT industry. He brings to QQT his strategic vision and management experience from his over twenty years in West Coast industry leaders (Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics, 3Com) as EMEA director and VicePresident, plus another twenty years driving software startups in the security and bioinformatics fields as CEO and Board member, having sold the latter startup to PerkinElmer. Victor PhD’s is from University of Barcelona and  he is also an MBA from ESADE, having followed  subsequent training at INSEAD and IESE.

Responsible for strategy direction, business planning, plan execution, team spirit, key partnerships and financing (clients, private and public).

Pol Forn-Díaz

Co-Founder & Chief Hardware Architect

Pol obtained his PhD from TU Delft in 2010 with a study of superconducting flux qubits and the limits of the force of interaction with a superconducting resonator. He was then postdoctoral researcher with the Kimble group at the California Institute of Technology, working on the interface of cold atoms and photonic waveguides. In a second postdoctoral stage, he was a fellow at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, working with Dr C. Wilson and A. Lupascu on superconducting qubits interacting with the propagation of microwave fields. He is a partner at Entanglement Partners SL. In 2017, he was appointed BSC researcher to lead experimental efforts to build a quantum processor using superconducting circuits.

Artur Garcia Sáez

Co-founder and Chief Software Architect

Artur Garcia-Saez obtained his Ph.D. at The Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) working on classical and quantum correlations. Since then, he has worked at Universitat de Barcelona and the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook. He is currently working at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center on optimization problems and Machine Learning applications.

Jordi Blasco

Co-Founder & Chief Financial & Legal Officer

Jordi is the founder and managing partner of ArsCorporate, a global investment banking boutique in Barcelona, member of the M&A WORLDWIDE, a global M&A firm alliance. Jordi is a M&A advisor, lecturer, and serves on a number of Boards of Directors and/or Advisory Boards, from sizable SMEs, family-owned companies or listed companies.

Responsible for Financial and legal directions, funding rounds and legal compliance.

Manel Martínez

Chief Technology Officer

Manel Martinez is Research Professor at IFAE, where he has been Scientific Director of the Severo Ochoa Excellence Program and member of its management for over 8 years, managing the 8 M€ Severo Ochoa Grant.

 He got his PhD in 1986 at UB, and has worked as a Particle Physicist in accelerators at DESY (Hamburg), CERN (Geneva) and SLAC (Stanford) and later in observatories for Astrophysics and Astroparticle Physics in Chile and the Canaries.

 

He is a recognised world expert in Particle Physics and Astroparticle Physics, and the design and construction of complex and innovative instrumentation for High-Energy-Physics and its applications. During his career, he has led many international teams of scientists and engineers in state-of-the-art instrumentation development and construction of all kinds of devices, and all project sizes. He is also a world reference in VHE Gamma Ray astronomy in which he has lead an international Collaboration of about 250 scientists and engineers for the design and construction of the MAGIC Telescopes (a project of about 15 M€), and later a world-wide Consortium of about 1800 scientist and engineers for the design and construction of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) (a project of about 500 M€). In the last years he has participated actively together with Dr. Pol Forn-Diaz in the construction of the Quantum Computing Laboratory infrastructure at IFAE.

Albert Solana

Business Developer Manager

Albert Solana is the current Software Lead and holds a postgraduate in Quantum Engineering (UPC), an MBA at ESADE & Stern NYU and a BSc in Computer Science (UPC). He developed his professional experience in the consulting business in innovative technologies, such as: digital identity, blockchain, Big Data and Data Science, and quantum computing. Currently coordinating the software team to design and implement the Quantum as a Service (QaaS) to provide service for Qilimanjaro clients.

Marta P Estarellas

Chief Product Officer and Team Manager

Marta focuses on the design of new techniques to reduce the qubit overhead required to encode complex problems into a quantum annealer; the simulation of quantum many-body systems and the study of its quantum information processing abilities; the study of representations, compilation and optimization methods for quantum algorithms; and the development of metrics and benchmarks to assess and compare the power of quantum devices. She is also interested in identifying complex problems in quantum chemistry that could be efficiently solved by quantum annealers.

 

She is actively collaborating with the University of York (UK) and the National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo). She is also known for her passion for craft beer, dogs and japanese food.

Daniel Szombati

Senior Quantum Engineer

Daniel has obtained his PhD from the TU Delft on quantum transport in exotic low temperature semiconductor physics. He then dived into the world of superconducting qubits by taking on research position first at the University of Queensland in Brisbane and then at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where he made his contribution to the field via significant scientific publications on first principle qubit physics. He is now leading the research efforts at Qilimanjaro towards a first coherent adiabatic quantum computing processor.

Ramiro Sagastizabal

Senior Quantum Engineer

Ramiro has a degree in Physics from the National University of Cordoba (Argentina), Master in Physics from the University of Aix-Marseille (France). During his PhD at TU Delft (The Netherlands) he specialized in design, fabrication and control of superconducting qubits, where this quarter he will read his thesis entitled “Experimental Quantum Simulations with Noisy Intermmediate-Scale Quantum Processors”.

Alicia Labián

Corporate Operations Manager

Alicia has a BSc in Physics and a MSc in Science Communication. She has worked in the field of Corporate Communications in high level research centers such as the Catalan Institute for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) and the Institute for High Energy Physics (IFAE). She complements her scientific background with a wide vision of the startup and agency workflow. Alicia has also worked in advertising and consulting agencies. She joins QQT from the well-known Barcelona delivery unicorn Glovo.

Recently, she has been admitted to the IESE Executive MBA, starting in September 2022. She is passionate about her family, with a special mention to her baby girl, Luna.

Responsible for Brand development, project PR, projects’ milestone management with fluent workflow and people management.

Rami Barends

Advisor

Prof. Dr. ir. Rami Barends is an expert on superconducting qubits. He was one of the lead researchers at Google during the demonstration of beyond-classical computing.

Prof. Barends obtained his PhD at Delft University of Technology from Prof. Teun Klapwijk, and later joined the team of Prof. John Martinis prior to merging with Google. Currently, Prof. Barends is the director of the new Peter Grünberg Institute for Functional Quantum Systems.

Stefano Carrazza

Advisor

Prof. Dr. Stefano Carrazza is an expert in computational methods for science with particular emphasis in theoretical physics and Artificial Intelligence. Prof. Carrazza obtained his PhD at the University of Milan and later joined CERN as a senior research fellow in theoretical physics.

Currently, Prof. Carrazza is an associate professor at the University of Milan and coordinates several research projects involving high-energy physics, quantum computing, big data for economics and medical physics.

Fabio Gallo

Advisor

Fabio Gallo is a recognized expert in the High Performance Computing (HPC) field, with over 35 years in senior management roles in this segment. He led international sales and marketing organizations for large IT companies such as IBM, Silicon Graphics, Cray, Bull and Lenovo and held senior executive roles, including CEO, in a number of technology start-ups.

He has been a steering board member for the German company Science + Computing and for the European Technology Platform for HPC (ETP4HPC) a European Union initiative aimed at enabling HPC developments in Europe.

Jose Ignacio Latorre

Advisor

Prof. Jose Ignacio Latorre is an expert in quantum information theory. He is the Director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) in Singapore and the Chief Researcher of the Quantum Research Centre at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi.

Prof. Latorre has an extensive research career at University of Barcelona, Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen, MIT and CERN, and has directed the Benasque Pedro Pascual Science Center. He is a prolific science communicator and has published several books on Quantum Technologies and Artificial Intelligence.

Arkady Fedorov

Advisor

Dr. Arkady Fedorov completed his PhD studies at Clarkson University, US in 2005. His research work was primarily on theoretical aspects of quantum information science and decoherence in solid state systems. He was then appointed a postdoctoral fellow KIT, Germany working on a theory of superconducting quantum circuits in application to quantum computing and quantum optics phenomena. In 2007-2010 he worked in TU Delft, The Netherlands conducting experiments with superconducting flux qubits. After joining the University of Queensland, Australia as faculty member in 2013, he established a new experimental research laboratory and has been leading this laboratory since.

 

His most notable contributions include realization of several key components for quantum information processing with superconducting qubits. Among these are the first implementation of three three-qubit gates, the first implementation of quantum teleportation in solid-state and the most comprehensive test of quantum contextuality. For his research Fedorov was awarded the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in 2015 and the University of Queensland Foundation Excellence Research Fellowship in 2016