You’ve done it. After years of painstaking research, you’ve pushed the boundary. Maybe you’ve achieved a record-breaking coherence time (T2), demonstrating your qubits can maintain their fragile quantum state, ∣ψ⟩, for precious microseconds longer than anyone else. Or perhaps you’ve engineered a novel coupling mechanism, achieving a two-qubit gate fidelity that inches closer to the hallowed ground of fault tolerance.
You walk into a investor meeting armed with this beautiful, hard-won data. You explain the intricate physics, the brilliant engineering, the sheer scientific achievement. The investor, a sharp mind from the world of finance or SaaS, nods politely and, after you finish, asks a simple question that cuts through the complexity:
“So what?”
This is the moment where countless fundraising pitches from brilliant quantum founders falter. It is the most common and devastating mistake we see: confusing a phenomenal scientific benchmark with a compelling business case. They are not the same thing. Investors, even those in deep tech, are not funding lab experiments; they are funding the foundations of a future enterprise. They invest in the answer to "So what?".
Your job is not to dumb down your science. It is to elevate it by translating it into the language of value. At DM & Associates, we guide our clients through this crucial process using a simple, powerful framework.
The Benchmark-to-Business-Impact (B2B-I) Framework
To secure funding, you must build a bridge from your benchmark to the investor’s bottom line. This bridge has three essential spans.
Step 1: Define the Technical Advantage. Don't just state your metric. Explain what it enables. A technical advantage is the immediate consequence of your improved benchmark. It’s the answer to the question, "Because we achieved , we can now do which was previously impossible or impractical."
- A longer coherence time (T2) doesn't just look good on a chart; it means you can run deeper quantum circuitsbefore decoherence scrambles the results.
- Higher gate fidelity doesn't just reduce errors; it means the overhead for quantum error correction (QEC) is significantly lower, making the path to a fault-tolerant machine more attainable.
- A novel on-chip architecture doesn't just fit more qubits; it might enable higher connectivity or a more efficient topology, reducing the number of complex SWAP operations required for certain algorithms.
This is the first crucial translation: from a number to a capability.
Step 2: Articulate the Business Impact. This is the most critical span of the bridge. How does your new technical capability solve a painful, high-value problem for a specific customer? This is where your science meets the market.
- Running deeper quantum circuits isn't the end goal. The business impact is that a pharmaceutical company can now simulate larger molecules, dramatically reducing the time and cost of pre-clinical drug discovery.
- Lowering the QEC overhead isn't just an academic victory. The business impact is that an aerospace firm can achieve a computationally advantageous result on your NISQ-era device years sooner than on a competitor's machine, allowing them to optimize a complex logistics network and save billions.
You must move from what your machine can do to what your customer can achieve.
Step 3: Quantify the Market Opportunity. Who are these customers and how big is the problem you are solving for them? This is where you ground your entire narrative in financial reality.
- That pharmaceutical R&D market? It's a multi-billion dollar space. Your beachhead market might be the top 20 firms, representing an immediate addressable market in the hundreds of millions.
- That aerospace logistics problem? It's a known, quantified inefficiency. Capturing even a small fraction of those savings represents a massive revenue opportunity.
This final step proves to investors that you aren't just building an amazing piece of technology; you're building it for a large, defined market with a clear pain point.
Putting the Framework into Practice
Let's look at two hypothetical examples.
Case Study 1: "CryoQubit Systems" (Vertically Integrated)
- Benchmark: "Through our proprietary fabrication process, we've achieved a 40% improvement in T2 times for superconducting transmons compared to published academic results."
- Narrative Translation (using B2B-I):
- "Through our proprietary, full-stack fabrication process—our core IP moat—we have achieved a 40% improvement in qubit coherence time. (1. Technical Advantage) This breakthrough allows us to run quantum chemistry simulations with significantly greater depth than any commercially available competitor. (2. Business Impact) For our initial target customers in pharmaceutical R&D, this means they can model molecular interactions that are currently intractable, potentially cutting years and hundreds of millions of dollars from their drug discovery pipeline. (3. Market Opportunity) We are initially targeting the top 15 global pharma companies, an R&D market that spends over \$5B annually on computational chemistry alone."
Case Study 2: "Photonic Designs Inc." (Fabless)
- Benchmark: "Our novel multiplexing architecture, designed for a standard silicon photonics foundry, allows for 100 logical qubits on a single chip."
- Narrative Translation (using B2B-I):
- "Our breakthrough is not in the manufacturing, but in our capital-efficient, fabless IP. Our novel architecture allows us to represent 100 logical qubits on a single chip from a standard silicon photonics foundry. (1. Technical Advantage) This scale enables the execution of portfolio optimization algorithms, like Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO), that are too large for current-generation quantum hardware. (2. Business Impact) For our target customers in investment banking and hedge funds, this provides a powerful new tool to identify alpha and manage risk in ways that are impossible with classical computers. (3. Market Opportunity) The market for financial risk management solutions exceeds \$20B, and we provide a unique quantum advantage for a high-value niche within it."
Conclusion: You are a Storyteller
Investors are not expecting you to be a business expert overnight. But they are expecting you to see beyond your own lab. They need to know that the brilliant scientist they are backing understands the pathway to building a sustainable, impactful enterprise.
Translating your benchmarks is not a sign of selling out; it is a sign of strategic maturity. It is the act of honoring your own scientific achievement by giving it the powerful commercial narrative it deserves.
