Unitary Foundation 2025 Annual Report
Read the full 2025 Annual Report here.
To the UF community,
2025 gives me the privilege to reflect on what has yet again been the largest year for quantum technology. Private investment in 2025 surpassed $10Bn, more than double the previous high water mark in 2024. We now see several large public quantum technology companies, increased acquisitions and dealmaking, new public initiatives and spotlight focus at the national level. Quantum technology ranked second, right after AI, on the list of 2025 Science and Technology Highlights released by the White House.
In 2025, we’ve also seen an openness to support new funding structures, with new Focused Research Organizations and the newly announced NSF Tech Labs program. This validates our view that new and independent organizations, with dedicated teams in a specific space, can go faster in new fields. Unitary Foundation has operated as a startup research organization from the beginning, and we are encouraged to see more partners adopting this approach.
If you want to feed a fire then you need to open breathing space between the logs to allow air in as fuel. At Unitary Foundation, we continue to build these open spaces through the microgrants, community programs, and open source software that draw in the talent to grow the quantum industry. In 2025, we hosted our largest unitaryHack yet, with 65% of participating hackers engaging in open source for the first time.
Our mission is to lower the barriers to entry in quantum technology by building open, durable infrastructure that helps the field grow faster, and grow well.
While quantum tech advances, it has done so alongside a remarkable acceleration in artificial intelligence. It remains striking that some of the world’s most powerful foundation models are so widely accessible through cloud platforms, open source releases, and global communities of builders. Sci-fi might have you expect that such tech would only be available in a secret base, but these tools are being used by people all over the world to solve problems that matter to them, to express creativity, and to explore science and mathematics. Increasingly, they are also being used to help build quantum technology itself.
We will all benefit if quantum technology grows with this same openness: scaling responsibly, remaining accessible, and shaped to advance human flourishing through the fundamental rules of nature: quantum mechanics.
William Zeng, PhD
President, Unitary Foundation