World Quantum Day falls on 14 April each year, a date chosen for the first digits of Planck’s constant. In 2025 the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) Saudi Arabia hosted its national event at The Garage, the innovation hub run by the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) in Riyadh, under the title “Discovering Quantum Possibilities: A Day of Exploration and Inspiration”. C4IR’s wrap-up report counts 23 speakers, 11 sessions, 338 guests in the room and an online audience of around 362,000.
For us the day had one fixed point. In the afternoon the World Economic Forum announced the winners of its UpLink Quantum for Society Challenge, and Quantasphere was one of the ten.
The challenge
UpLink is the World Economic Forum’s open-innovation platform. In November 2024 it launched the Quantum for Society Challenge in partnership with C4IR Saudi Arabia, inviting early-stage companies applying quantum technologies to five areas: climate solutions, materials and manufacturing, equitable healthcare, agriculture and food systems, and freshwater. Submissions closed in December. An international panel of philanthropists, practitioners and industry experts then selected ten Top Innovators from 100 submissions, judging on business model, real-world impact, scalability, technology readiness and measurable contribution to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The ten were Algorithmiq (Finland), Nomad Atomics (Australia), PlanetAI Space (Spain), Planqc (Germany), Qnity (Brazil), Quantasphere, Quantum Dice (United Kingdom), Quantum Mads (Spain), Quminex (Canada) and Xairos Systems (United States).
Each innovator received a trophy from Dr Basma AlBuhairan, Managing Director of C4IR Saudi Arabia, and Dr Talal AlSedairy, Senior Vice President for Research and Development at KACST.
Why healthcare data
Our submission addressed the equitable-healthcare track. The Forum’s own account of the winners put it plainly: Quantasphere’s goal is to make sensitive data, of the kind that healthcare produces in volume, safe from future quantum computers. Patient records and genomic data stay sensitive for a lifetime, which makes them the clearest case of Harvest Now, Decrypt Later exposure. That focus is the same one behind Tessera today: post-quantum protection that a hospital network can adopt without rebuilding what it already runs.
The rest of the day
The programme ran four keynotes and three panels alongside the challenge. Speakers included Dr Mariam Nouh of KACST, Arunima Sarkar, Head of Frontier Technologies at the World Economic Forum, Muhammad AlSaiyari of Saudi Aramco, who chairs the Saudi Quantum Computing Association, Ilyas Khan of Quantinuum, Rebecca Krauthamer of QuSecure, and Professor David Keyes of KAUST, who moderated a fireside chat with two of the winning companies. A series of technical sessions on entanglement exchange ran with the Saudi Quantum Computing Association.
The day also carried a national announcement: Quantum Valley, a KACST initiative with Saudi Aramco and the Saudi Data and AI Authority, working with Pasqal and IBM.
Arunima Sarkar’s line from the stage stayed with us: “Technology itself is not enough. What the world needs most are new ideas when it comes to solving society’s biggest challenges.” Sadaf Hosseini of UpLink made the same point from the other side, noting that innovation needs pathways, people, platforms and investment, which is what UpLink exists to provide; the platform has accelerated more than 500 startups to date.
What came after
The recognition placed Quantasphere in the Forum’s quantum network at the point where Saudi Arabia was committing to a national quantum roadmap. Later in 2025, C4IR Saudi Arabia published Towards Saudi Arabia’s Quantum-Enabled Future, the first national pilot of the Forum’s Quantum Economy Blueprint, and Quantasphere contributed to it. In November 2025 our Chief Executive Officer, Uzma Siddiqui, presented Quantasphere at the ITU AI for Good “Quantum World Tour: Saudi Arabia” startup session.
Sources: World Economic Forum, “10 startups win the Quantum for Society Challenge” (April 2025); C4IR Saudi Arabia, World Quantum Day 2025 wrap-up report; Saudi Press Agency, 3 April 2025; The Quantum Insider, 14 April 2025.