Show Notes 194: From Lab to Startup: Inside Coherence Engine's Quantum Computing Journey

Interview: Dr Robin Sterling, Founder — Coherence Engine

Robin's journey into quantum computing is anything but linear. After a PhD in ion trap quantum computing at the University of Sussex, a postdoc at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and a stint working on smart cat flaps at a Cambridge pet tech company, he eventually found his way into quantum hardware — then into building prop replicas for Rick and Morty, Star Trek, and Harry Potter. It's that unusual blend of experimental physics and mass-market consumer engineering that underpins Coherence Engine's entire thesis.

Key talking points:

• The quantum timeline reality check: Robin started his PhD 20 years ago when useful quantum computers were "at least 10 years away." He's seen the field go from academic curiosity to venture-backed race — with companies like Quantinuum and Riverlane demonstrating things that once felt like pipe dreams. But he's candid: today's systems are still orders of magnitude smaller than what's actually useful.

• The scaling bottleneck nobody is talking about: Right now, quantum systems are just small enough that engineers can manage complexity with Python scripts and intuition. Make them 100x bigger — which is what the industry needs — and that stops working entirely. It's the same wall classical computing hit in the 1980s, when CPU design had to be automated. "We can't meaningfully scale beyond where we are today without bringing in that automation, bringing in that abstraction," says Robin.

• What Coherence Engine actually does: The company builds system-level simulation and validation software for quantum hardware — covering dilution fridges, electronics, control stacks, FPGAs, and more. The goal: let quantum engineers design, simulate, and validate their next-generation systems before buying a single piece of hardware. Think of it as CAD tools for quantum computers.

• The founding story: Founded in August 2024, with pre-seed funding secured in January 2025, Coherence Engine was built with the support of Cambridge Future Tech (CFT) — the deep tech venture builder based at the Bradfield Centre. Robin credits CFT as instrumental in turning his idea into a fundable, scalable company, particularly as a solo founder coming off the back of a previous unsuccessful startup.

• What's next: The team is actively hiring, targeting their first product release later in 2025, and planning a seed round towards the end of the year.

"We can't make that a hundred times bigger. We need to be able to offload that complexity into something else — something that helps us understand it, abstract it, and ultimately automate it." — Dr Robin Sterling

Find out more: coherenceengine.tech

Produced by Joe Donaghy of Cambridge TV. Supported by media partner Business Weekly. Thanks to Holden Polestar, Mantle Space, Cambridge TV.

Subscribe on all major podcast platforms or visit cambridgetechpodcast.com. If you enjoyed this episode, a five-star review goes a long way — it helps more people discover the show.

AI Transcript

00:00

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00:35

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Welcome to the Cambridge Tech Podcast, talking all things technology from the heart of the UK's tech capital. Here are your hosts, Faye Holland and James Parton. Hi, I'm James.

01:02

Faye Holland

And I'm Faye. So welcome back, James. We had an interloop last week in your absence, so it's good to have you back.

01:10

James Parton

Yeah, I heard that I've lost my.

01:11

Faye Holland

Job, but I'm back.

01:13

James Parton

I had a good week. Thank you. Enjoyed the sunshine. It's that classic, isn't it? We always moan the weather's terrible, and then when it's lovely, we moan it's too hot. It's been a week of coping with the heat, but thanks for covering the fort for me while I was away. This week's been loads of great meetings. Meetings, always planning. There's always something cooking behind the scenes. I also popped over to Bury St Edmunds for the AI Festival, which was held at the STEM center at West Suffolk College. So that was nice to visit somewhere I'd never been before. I met some new faces, some new people. Chatted with Mike Williams, who's running the new Stowmarket Innovation Gateway. So I'm definitely going to go over there and have a look at that.

01:48

James Parton

Also had a really good chat with Stuart Catchpole, who's the director of Space East. Seems like we're mentioning space a lot recently in the last couple of months, so they support the growth and development of the UK space sector in the east of England. So we should try and get Stuart on. So it was a really interesting conversation. We had also saw a few Cambridge faces. Barclays Eagle Labs were there, Mills and Reeve were there, Chris Ellis was there. So, yeah, an enjoyable day out. How about you?

02:12

Faye Holland

I was up in Manchester again last week and again this week, so just still meeting so many people, which is great. It's things like the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, their growth hub. They have 300 people in the growth hub alone. The scale of Manchester is really quite overwhelming and, you know, they're doing some really great stuff. So continuing to meet lots of people across Manchester, whether it's university, the public sector. Yeah. And so just busy up north. Got stuck on a train last week. Four hours at 30 degrees. That was not pleasant. Not pleasant. But there's nothing I can do about the trains. I don't think so. We'll leave that one for another day. What else I've been prepping for we're going to the Global R and D Investment Summit which is taking place Monday and Tuesday of London Tech Week.

03:01

Faye Holland

So back to a bit of event organization on that one. And yeah, like you, the heat. I'm glad it's a little bit more normal now.

03:09

James Parton

Glad I wasn't on a train for four hours.

03:12

Faye Holland

Indeed. So should we just do some quick news? I think we've got a couple of pieces for you today. The first up is Cambridge and Colorado based Quantum computing trailblazer. Quantinuum's Nasdaq IPO is ticked to reach around $13 billion valuation, which is outstanding. Business Weekly Believe this is the first IPO in the quantum computing space. The market globally for Quantum is tipped to exceed 20 billion by 2030 as it looks to enhance genomics in general, drug discovery, defense, cryptology, security, logistics, climate modeling and much more. So I mean that's a big chunk valuation within that market. So let's watch that one with interest.

03:58

James Parton

Yeah, absolutely. Regular listeners might remember that we covered the ARM IPO quite extensively. So yeah, we'll definitely keep our eyes peeled for news on the IPO head In the quantum space, 42 technology has played a central role in helping Omnisense, a fellow Cambridge based business specializing in terrestrial positioning, to demonstrate safer autonomous drone landing systems when satellite navigation signals are unreliable. The system uses a ground based ultra wide positioning technology that has been developed by Omnisense through its European Space Agency Supported Drone Home program. Autonomous landing is one of the most safety critical phases of any drone mission and is particularly challenging when a device's satellite navigation system is impaired due to signal obstruction, reflection or interference, for example when operating near tall buildings, in busy ports or inside tunnels. We're delighted to support omnisense in delivering its groundbreaking Drone Home project.

04:53

James Parton

GNSS underpins many of today's critical systems, so developing a terrestrial positioning technology far more reliable autonomous operations in challenging environments is a major advance for drone safety, said Paul Bayo park, head of Electronics and software for 42 technology.

05:10

Faye Holland

Yeah, so it's amazing how much things in the sky are starting to take off now. So I think this kind of technology is going to be very important moving forward, isn't it? Okay, so this week's episode again, whilst you were off, I caught up with Dr. Robin Sterling who talked about his two decades of experience in quantum computing and deep tech systems engineering before he founded Coherence Engine, a company designing system level validation for quantum computing. Robin, hi. Welcome. Thanks for joining us on the podcast.

05:49

Robin Sterling

Hi. Well, nice to be here.

05:51

Faye Holland

So I believe you're from Brighton originally.

05:54

Robin Sterling

Yeah, that's right. I grew up, well, just a bit north of Brighton, but I grew up there and I ended up going back to do my PhD there as well.

06:01

Faye Holland

And so how did you end up in Cambridge?

06:04

Robin Sterling

I actually came to Cambridge after I left academia. So I was living in Israel at the Weizmann Institute. I was doing a postdoc there and then I decided academia wasn't for me. I was looking around for jobs. Cambridge has obviously got a lot of science based jobs, consultancy type jobs, so I thought I'd end up doing that. And then I got a job working for a cat flap company making smart cat flaps, which was interesting.

06:29

Faye Holland

Okay, I mean, that's gone on a complete tangent that I wasn't expecting, but that's all good. Was it an AI driven cat flap?

06:36

Robin Sterling

No, nothing.

06:36

Faye Holland

No, just cat flaps.

06:38

Robin Sterling

The cat flap was based on a new or novel technology to measure the RFID chip that's implanted in most cats. When a cat comes up to the cat flap, it would measure this chip and it would let the cat in or not. And so I joined as an R and D engineer to work on new products. So using my physics background to work on new sensors and new pet care solutions for things like measuring the body temperature of a dog while it's running around. So using a smart collar or a pet feeder that would only let the correct pet feed from the device, that kind of thing.

07:11

Faye Holland

So you found yourself working in Cambridge. And we'll come back to some of the other roles you had in Cambridge as well. But then I believe you're now in Norwich.

07:19

Robin Sterling

Yeah, that's right. So I worked in Cambridge for about eight years and then I moved to Norwich a couple of years ago to be with my partner.

07:27

Faye Holland

We have many people that we speak to from the Norwich community as well. So we very much cover across the east of England. Let's go back to what you studied. I believe it was quantum computing.

07:39

Robin Sterling

Yeah. So I did my PhD in ion trap based quantum computing. The idea being you trap a single atom above a chip and then when you get lots of atoms above this chip, you can move them around and with lasers perform special operations and you can build a quantum computer with this technology.

07:57

Faye Holland

20 Years ago, you started in the quantum space. So you must have quite a view on the industry and what has happened over the last 20 years.

08:10

Robin Sterling

It's actually been really remarkable to see. So 20 years ago we started doing, I started doing my PhD in IT and it was very much, oh, this is at least 10 years away. The intention was very much to build useful quantum computers. It wasn't pure blue sky research, it was to build a useful machine. But it was very early in that development. And then over that time it's gone from these early academic experiments, more and more impressive demonstrations. And then about 10, 12 years ago, that's when lots of startups started moving out of academia, they started founding companies and this research really started to accelerate where we started to get venture capital money being pumped into the field. The size of the experiments got much bigger. The level of technology improve very rapidly.

08:59

Robin Sterling

It's really been impressive how over the last 10 years the progress that this field has seen from as I said, academia to now where you have these really amazing devices. And in my field, companies like Continuum who are doing iron trap based research, what they're building and demonstrating today was a bit of a pipe dream. When I started my PhD 20 years ago, it was the vision were hoping to get towards. But there was always a part of me which thought, yeah, we'll never get there or never be achievable. And whilst these systems are still too small to do any useful quantum computation, just from an engineering perspective, they're just an amazing feat of engineering. It's really exciting to have seen that progress over this time.

09:40

Faye Holland

I know certainly from the Cambridge tech podcast point of view, we've had Ilyas on from Quantinuum, Steve's been on from Riverlane and New Quantum. Are they the kind of first generation companies that you would highlight as those examples?

09:57

Robin Sterling

Yeah, so I think that's the, yeah, first generation of companies where they were founded in the sort of the mid 20 teens and have been really driving that progress. Yeah.

10:06

Faye Holland

You talk then about some of the applications that are starting to come through, starting to look like more of a reality. If you were going to hedge your bets, where would you go in terms of what type of application is it going to be? Life science, Materials discovery, is it going to be something like that?

10:23

Robin Sterling

But we'll say there's been some really amazing recent research on breaking codes and that was always thought of as a much longer term roadmap where now that seems much more near term. Through conversations I've been having recently, even to the point where maybe that's an early application or early use, which. Which is, yeah, amazing. And I think it just shows that actually there is no, like crystal ball. Tomorrow someone might release a paper or there might be some research done which says, oh, this application is much nearer term than we previously thought, so maybe codes, but I don't know.

10:56

Faye Holland

Yeah, well, thank you for answering me. Putting you on the spot there. And then we've had the announcement early. Was it earlier on this year? I think it was about the largest quantum computer being based here in Cambridge. What do you think about that? And that opening up opportunities for more people to actually get involved and get hands on.

11:16

Robin Sterling

It's obviously really great news. It's great both that institutions are buying these machines because they are maybe the biggest machines or the largest machines, but they're still much smaller than what is actually useful. I think there's obviously a lot of hype driven around. Oh, it's of such size, such complexity, which is great from a technical development perspective, but we should always keep in sight that these are potentially orders of magnitude smaller than they need to be. So I think that the fact that they are being bought is good because it helps the system, it helps the ecosystem grow, drives revenue and gets us closer to the endpoint where they are useful. And of course, it's great just more broadly to get people interested in the industry, learn about the industry, learn about quantum computing.

12:00

Faye Holland

Let's move on now and talk about coherence engine. What is it? What does it do? What is the company, the background behind.

12:08

Robin Sterling

Coherence engineering that really comes from that long experience, both in academia and industry, but also industry that's not quantum based. So I spent years as an experimental physicist building lasers, building vacuum systems, trapping irons, struggling with these very complex machines to get very rudimentary things working. Things now you can buy off the shelf. I spent months building. It's a very long, painful, torturous experience, as anyone who's done it will know. And then what we've seen in the last 10 years is in companies trying to take this technology, trying to commercialize it, to take it from something that takes a group of PhD students a couple of years to build to being something that's repeatable and engineerable. And then also my experience, my personal experience outside of quantum.

12:59

Robin Sterling

So building cat flaps or then a job after that I had where I was building prop replicas from film and tv, so things like Rick and Morty and Star Trek and Harry Potter. That experience where it's a very different thing, you're building an embedded device. And this has to cost 5, $10 at the factory in China, you're going to make 200,000 of them. And they all have to work and you can't go in and you can't change them afterwards. Real mass market production. And so I've got this sort of roadmap of experience where from very experimental, you spend years building it and you want it to work once to an industry which is trying to take that and make it work reliably and have very high uptime for on AWS or something.

13:43

Robin Sterling

And then also the experience of real consumer market mass production, you're building hundreds of thousands of them, you need to have that engineering behind them. And I think coherence engine is sort of born out of this mixture of experience where you still in the quantum industry, it's still in this growing phase where we're moving from being very reliant on PhD graduates coming out of universities, having spent their academic career building the machines, bringing that experience into lab, using that experience to build the next generation. Tools are being built around it. They are getting better. The engineering behind a lot of them is amazing. So I don't want to take away from that, but there still is a lot to do. And these systems are still 10 times 100 times thousand times too small to be useful.

14:32

Robin Sterling

And so really coherence engineers looking at all of that and saying, okay, how do we help the industry move from these small, very complex systems? How do we take them from that to where they need to be say 100 times bigger than they are today. And what you really hit is then a bottleneck of complexity. So today these are extremely complex systems, but they're just at the edge where we can write Python scripts, we can use AI, we can use our intuition and knowledge to maintain that and keep a handle of that complexity, but we can't make that a hundred times bigger. We need to be able to offload that complexity into something else, Something that helps us understand it, abstract it and ultimately automate it.

15:15

Robin Sterling

And this is what the classical computing world did in the 80s where CPU design got the number of transistors, got to the point where it had to be automated. You can't manually make a CPU of a million transistors, or now a billion transistors. That process has to be automated. Similarly in quantum we've got to that bottleneck where we can't meaningfully scale beyond where we are today without bringing in that automation, bringing in that abstraction. That's a long winded way of saying that's what Coherence Engine is really aiming to do. So we're trying to say, okay, let's take that complexity, let's build simulations of the hardware. So that's a simulation of your dilution fridge, your electronics chip level design, but also your control stack. So that's your FPGAs, your GPUs, your CPUs that are running your pulse control, running your error correction, running your algorithms.

16:09

Robin Sterling

Let's build simulations of all of these different parts at a very high level. And then digging down and then through these simulations you start to learn, understand how these systems are operating and all of the high order effects like crosstalk and all the non intuitive aspects that come out, you start to learn about and you start to be able to design and build and optimize around. So that's what Coherence Engine is really trying to build, that kind of simulation and abstraction and ultimately design and validation of future systems. So when you want to build the next computer that's five times bigger than you have today, or ten times bigger than when you have today, you can design it, you can simulate it and then you can validate it before you actually buy any hardware.

16:52

Robin Sterling

And that's the goal here because that's how you get that ten hundred thousand x scaling that we need to get to.

16:58

Faye Holland

So ultimately you're helping companies to simulate so that they can build and scale a lot quicker when it doesn't actually exist. The ability to be able to do that.

17:09

Robin Sterling

Exactly. In a much more concise sentence. Yes.

17:13

Faye Holland

Okay. No, no, that's perfect. I just want to make sure that I actually, I understand it's just companies in the quantum space or companies wanting to leverage the quantum ecosystem.

17:23

Robin Sterling

We're really targeting the quantum ecosystem. So that's not just companies that are building full computers like Continuum or IBM or Google or Rigetti. It's also the supply chain. So people building the component parts, that's the fridges or the amplifiers or the control boxes. But it is really targeting the quantum space. We do see potential for this system level design simulation validation. We do see use cases for this type of system level design validation beyond quantum now, very early in our journey, but there are many industries where you have very complex heterogeneous systems of all sorts of analog and digital components where the ability to reason about that and reason about that at scale will be very important. But it's still very early in what we're developing. So that's for us in a few years time.

18:16

Faye Holland

Yeah. So let's Talk about how early it is for you. How long have you been going? What stage are you up to? Do you have something in play right now?

18:24

Robin Sterling

So were founded in August last year and we received our pre seed funding in January. There's myself and a couple of others and we're building our mvp. We have partnerships with both academia and commercial companies while we're doing that. And so we're really targeting to release our first product later in the year. So that's where we are today.

18:44

Faye Holland

Okay. And you said you raised your pre seed. What was that experience like?

18:50

Robin Sterling

It's very much a journey and I guess it's echoes what everyone talks about when they're fundraising. It's a, a roller coaster of emotions where you start very excited and then you have a bunch of calls and then it's you sort of trying to get traction and trying to build the product and trying to build a company and filling your time with investor calls. And it is a challenge. My partner was pregnant at the time, so I had the very clear deadline of when I had to get money in the bank. Added a lot more pressure to it, as you can imagine, but equally gave me a lot of focus. It was a, it was a difficult journey, but we got there.

19:22

Faye Holland

And does that give you a reasonable run rate or will you be looking at funding again soon?

19:28

Robin Sterling

We're going to hire up to giving us a 12 month Runway with the intention of raising our seed round towards the end of this year.

19:34

Faye Holland

You've talked, Robin, about different roles that you've had and it's 20 years since you started in the quantum space. What made you go actually, now I want to be a founder. What made you start that journey?

19:49

Robin Sterling

I think I've always wanted to be a founder before I got my job in Cambridge. Between the time I left academia and started my job at the Cat Flap company, there's about six months and I did a lot of hobbying. I did a lot of tinkering around. I like making things. I got very into Arduino and that kind of whole world of electronics. And I think the idea there, I really like the idea of building little gadgets and trinkets and things and selling them not at a venture scale, but just as a side business, a hobby really. I don't know what my expectations of being a founder were. I learned a huge amount from doing it the first time and a lot of those learnings have gone into doing it this time. Things not to do, but also things to do.

20:31

Robin Sterling

I think you hear a lot of people Talking about being a founder and the stress and the lack of sleep and the amount of work and that's all true. I had the idea for the company beginning of last year. At the time it was more of a coming off the back of a failed startup. It was a probably this is never going to happen, but I've got this good idea. And then through a series of fortunate events I went to a conference, I, I tested this idea out on a lot of engineers from big companies and got a lot of traction with it. And then through connections I'd made from my first startup, I met Cambridge Fuchsia Tech who were interested and really supportive and then ultimately we formed the company together.

21:14

Robin Sterling

That was incredibly useful for me because I think without Cambridge Future Tech as a solo founder, it would probably have been too big a task to do that alone.

21:25

Faye Holland

It's interesting you mentioning Cambridge Future Tech there because it is almost a non traditional investment model. But obviously that has worked really well for you as a solo entrepreneur. Just tell us a little bit about what that experience has been like with cft.

21:43

Robin Sterling

Yeah, I think CFT have been brilliant actually, especially from my circumstances. So coming off the back of an unsuccessful startup. But through that startup I'd been part of an incubator at the NQCC and they made the introduction to Cambridge Fuchsia Tech. So I met them, we had a series of early conversations where I just met them online, but also came in person, shared my thinking, shared what I wanted to build with them. They were really supportive. And then when we decided to found the company together, they were really excellent in all of that company building aspect that they really contribute to. So they've been really instrumental in taking this idea that I had and helping me form a company around it and ultimately getting investment for it. It's been a really great experience.

22:27

Robin Sterling

And especially as a solo founder and particularly in my circumstance where coming off that, the other startup I was contracting part time and perhaps in a more precarious position to take a few less risks. Having that support was incredibly valuable.

22:43

Faye Holland

Yeah, and I think that's the thing, isn't it? They have that whole ecosystem within CFT to actually help the startups to be able to get those good groundings in place for them. So. So Robin, I think it's been really interesting. You are still very early in the journey, but I think listeners will really appreciate you sharing your experiences from the quantum industry and having started one company, that one not working and then being resilient enough to pick up, start another one and approach it in a slightly different way than probably many of our other companies on the podcast have done. So you've said you're going to look at fundraising and you're looking at expanding.

23:29

Robin Sterling

Yeah, so we're actively hiring at the minute and we're actively expanding the team and then, yeah, towards the end of the year we'll start fundraising for our seed round.

23:38

Faye Holland

Brilliant. And where do people go to find out more information about Coherence Engine?

23:43

Robin Sterling

So the best place is probably coherenceengine Tech. That's probably the best place to find any information and contact.

23:48

Faye Holland

All right, super. Thank you so much for your time today, Robin.

23:57

James Parton

Today's show was produced by Joe Donaghy of Cambridge TV and supported by our media partner, Business Weekly. The Cambridge Tech Podcast is available on all major podcast platforms and on cambridgetechpodcast.com if you've enjoyed this podcast, please give it a five star review. It'll really help others discover the show.

24:27

Faye Holland

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