The season of mashups continues, except this time it’s a cross-domain remix.
Yesterday, Israeli-American hydrogen drone company Heven AeroTech announced that it’s teaming up with quantum giant IonQ ($IONQ) to develop “quantum-enabled drones for national security applications.”
Basically, that means that IonQ’s quantum tech—including quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum sensing, and quantum security technologies—will be built into Heven’s drones, which the two companies say will “redefine mission resilience, stealth, and operational performance in GPS-denied environments.”
Heven founder and CEO Ben Levinson told Tectonic that the two companies will work together to build quantum-powered systems that will work on drones.
“Our partnership is focused around building quantum-powered solutions for navigation challenges, communication challenges, as well as sensing and compute challenges, all focused on drones,” he said. “This can be the first and, as far as I know, the most significant effort building quantum for drone systems.”
And why quantum? Levinson said he and the Heven team believe that it’s the future, basically. “We think quantum is going to be the main way to go [in terms of] communication and navigation,” he said. “We have always believed that it’s important to really look around the curve.”
Supercomputer: We’ve covered Heven before, so let’s kick it off with IonQ.
The computing giant is a pretty major name in the quantum world—it was founded back in 2015, built on about 25 years of quantum research. The company builds trapped-ion quantum processors and sells access to them through AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
- IonQ went public in 2021, making it the first public pure-play quantum computing company.
- As of this morning, their market cap is about $16.6B.
- They basically offer quantum as a service—customers across industries (not just defense) access quantum computing via cloud platforms.
- IonQ has acquired a few smaller companies, including Oxford Ionics (a UK-based quantum-computing startup) and satellite/SAR company Capella Space.
Heven, for its part, is pretty squarely in the drone game.
- The company was founded in 2019 and specializes in hydrogen-powered drones, which they say can fly higher, longer, and more stealthily than battery or fuel-powered ones.
- The company has operations in the US and in Israel.
- They’ve got several different models, including the heavy-lift H100, the long-endurance Raider, and a few smaller tactical/ISR drones.
- Earlier this year, Heven partnered with Mach Industries for drone production and acquired Zepher Flight Labs.
Better together: Levinson said that the two companies will co-produce these drone-specific quantum systems—starting with the already-proven stuff, like navigation, and then scaling up to more ambitious projects, like compute.
According to a statement put out by the two companies, tech built by the two companies “could” (important) include:
- Quantum Sensing: Developing and using quantum sensors for things like “alternative positioning, navigation, and timing” on Heven’s drones.
- Quantum Networking and Security: Using quantum communications to create super-secure, hard-to-jam links between swarms of drones and controllers.
- Quantum Computing: using IonQ’s quantum computing capabilities to “optimize fleet routing and real-time fusion of drone and satellite imagery.”
Levinson said that the biggest challenge—as with most things drone-related—will be size and weight. Plus, they’ve got to make sure everything works in places “from the Middle East to the North Pole.”
“Our customers require these drones to work everywhere, anytime. There are all these challenges—but this is also the exciting part,” he added.
Despite this, it seems they’re going to get things up and running quickly. “Over the next 12 months, we’re going to start seeing specific quantum technologies being used on drones,” Levinson said.
Double down: IonQ isn’t just partnering with Heven—they’re also investing in the company.
Levinson couldn’t reveal exactly how much the quantum giant had invested in his company, but said that it was part of a “much larger round” that the company would be announcing “very soon.”
He also said that a few big partnerships and announcements are in the works, but wouldn’t tell us what, no matter how hard we prodded.
Suppose we have to watch this space, as the kids say.