Announcing Our New CEO

Unitary Foundation has grown by leaps and bounds since its origins as a microgrant fund in 2018. With 136 grants distributed across 30+ countries, hundreds of thousands of downloads of public goods projects like Mitiq, Metriq, UCC, and QOSS, and a fantastic community of 5,700+ developers using our Discord, we are building the infrastructure necessary to ensure quantum technology is accessible and useful to all.

The future of quantum tech needs strong open foundations.

The quantum tech industry is also scaling rapidly ($3Bn+ in private VC in 2025) and the open source ecosystem needs to grow with it. Our public goods and open source work across quantum is more useful and important than ever. It will remove bottlenecks and ensure we have the widest possible participation in our field’s advancement.

To ensure we respond to this moment, we began a search last year to find a CEO for Unitary Foundation, with the goal of driving open-source projects critical to the quantum ecosystem, scaling funding, partnerships, and community, and fulfilling the Foundation’s mission across industry, government, and academia.

After completing our search, I am thrilled to announce Ben Castanon as Unitary Foundation’s first CEO!

Ben has been with Unitary Foundation over three years, beginning in the role of Chief of Staff, before being named COO in 2024; overseeing partnerships, community, and grantmaking. Under his direction, UF has grown its Labs initiative including expanding its open benchmarking initiative and the Quantum Open Source Software Survey, securing the first private foundation support of the non-profit, inaugurated the unitaryCON workshop series, opened Unitary Foundation France, scaled the membership program, and much more.

Prior to his work at Unitary Foundation, Ben spent 15 years in philanthropy and non-profits focused on scaling innovative support mechanisms and community development resources for scientists and artists operating at the vanguard of their fields.

On behalf of the rest of the board of directors, we are thrilled to work with Ben to continue to scale our work and impact on the open source quantum community.

Open source tools and public goods will be the backbone of the field, a multiplier and democratizer for research and innovation. Our work lies at the center of it all. I’m thrilled to lead the Foundation to ensure our growing open source community is well-resourced, connected, inclusive, and thriving. - Ben Castanon, CEO, Unitary Foundation

Want to get involved? Join nearly 6,000 developers from around the world on our Discord to learn more about building the quantum open source ecosystem.