The Qilimanjaro founder team is pleased to announce that, as of 3rd of April, Marta P Estarellas will take the helm of the startup as the new CEO that shall drive its key, next phase of development. Marta has been part of the Qilimanjaro management team since she joined in 2020, at the start of Qilimanjaro’s operations, and has developed strong leadership capabilities to propel the company to the next stage of development.
In these first three years of existence, Qilimanjaro has built a solid scientific and engineering team to become a promising player in the superconducting qubit market, with a focus on flux qubits for quantum analog computers to be released in late 2024. Qilimanjaro in the meantime has deployed the first quantum computer in the UAE in 2021 at the Technology Innovation Institute, and has won a tender in 2023 to deploy the first quantum computer in Spain, the Quantum-Spain project at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Qilimanjaro has been awarded a number of grants, including a significant one in 2023 from the European Innovation Council. All in all, Qilimanjaro has received over 9M€ in funding, has accumulated revenue of over 2M€ and has signed contracts for additional 8M€ of new business.
Victor Canivell adds: “Marta has the skills and the scientific track record to build Qilimanjaro into a key player in the quantum computing industry. We are very excited that she takes on this challenge with the full support of the Qilimanjaro management team. Marta’s background, as a quantum computer expert, as a computer scientist and as a computational chemist, provides her with a unique understanding of the opportunities that lie ahead.”
Marta P. Estarellas says: “Qilimanjaro is a place for adventures. The first one started with Victor and the rest of the founders, who set up our base camps and a strong team of engineers, scientists and business people ready to start scaling towards our goal: build quantum computers that are useful for businesses. They helped us gather the resources, structure and motivation, and we are now ready for our climb. At times it will be hard, and certainly there will be challenges, but the team is prepared, our technology is ready, and I am very confident we will reach the top.”
The founder team believes that this appointment is very timely, both because now is the start of Qilimanjaro’s next development stage, and also because of the recently announced support to Qilimanjaro provided by the European Innovation Council and by the Intel Ignite program. These initiatives, together with a proactive engagement with other European quantum ecosystem startups in Europe, through the Quantum Industry Consortium QuIC, set the stage for the successful development of Qilimanjaro.
To support Marta in this new phase, Qilimanjaro will count specially on the expertise of Manel Martinez as Chief Technical Officer and on Albert Solana, as Chief Business Officer, a part, of course from all the Qilimanjaro technical and non-technical team and the founders and advisors, who’ll keep guiding the company to its final goals.
