From StEP to spinout: Student venture turned quantum innovator
Seven years after winning the Incubator’s student entrepreneurship programme, Quantum Dice enters a new phase of expansion
What can happen when students take their first steps into entrepreneurship through StEP?
For Quantum Dice, the answer is a spinout, seven years of growth, and a new photonics-based hardware platform to enable energy efficient compute.
StEP is the Incubator's eight-week student entrepreneurship programme delivered in collaboration with Oxford Edge, and designed for University of Oxford students from any discipline who are interested in entrepreneurship. Over the course of the summer, students develop practical entrepreneurial skills, test assumptions, validate ideas and shape ventures with guidance from founders, investors and Oxford University Innovation experts.
After meeting in StEP’s inaugural 2019 cohort, the student founders created Quantum Dice and became the first winning team. Founded to develop quantum technologies, the company has since grown from a student venture into a successful venture capital backed and revenue generating spinout, developing technologies at the forefront of cybersecurity and next-generation computing. Seven years on, their journey demonstrates the lasting impact that StEP can have on ambitious student entrepreneurs.
From intellectual property to venture creation
Bringing together students from a range of academic backgrounds, StEP enabled the future Quantum Dice founders to form a team based on intellectual property originating from the University of Oxford's Department of Physics.
For aspiring entrepreneurs, StEP provides the unique opportunity to build a venture around either their own idea or existing University of Oxford intellectual property. By connecting entrepreneurial students with new technologies, the programme enables participants to explore how research can be developed into viable businesses while gaining first-hand experience of venture creation.
For the Quantum Dice founders, that meant learning how to assess the commercial potential of a breakthrough quantum technology, evaluate potential markets and develop a viable business proposition. With continued support from Oxford University Innovation experts, the team went on to spin out the company the following year.
StEP was the first programme that trusted aspiring student entrepreneurs to commercialise university IP. It gave us the funding, network and support to build a company around the technology. Winning the programme meant we could develop our first prototype and connected us with the right quantum startup network to grow afterwards.
A timeline of success
Seven years on: Quantum Dice's next chapter
Since spinning out in 2020, Quantum Dice has successfully brought its patented source of randomness to market, deploying its Quantum Random Number Generator products in real-world cybersecurity applications.
Today, the company has entered a new phase of growth, having developed the first scalable Probabilistic Processing Unit (PPU) to realise a new form of compute, tackling problems that are difficult for conventional computers to solve efficiently. These include challenges such as optimising delivery routes, scheduling telecoms networks, designing computer chips and training energy-based A.
The company now employs 20 people and, earlier this year, moved into its new headquarters in central Oxford, bringing together its laboratory and office space, while also maintaining an office in central London.
We’re entering an exciting new phase for Quantum Dice as we push towards a new class of computing hardware capable of tackling some of industry’s most complex optimisation challenges, we continue to build on the foundations laid through StEP and the strength of the Oxford community. I’m particularly pleased that as we scale, we’ve been able to retain our close ties with the University and continue building in the centre of Oxford.
Building on the company’s field-validated quantum technology and underpinned by its patented source of randomness, Quantum Dice’s ORBITTM PPU architecture represents the company's expansion into probabilistic computing – an emerging approach to computation designed to handle uncertainty and complexity more effectively than traditional computing methods.
Quantum Dice's journey since winning StEP demonstrates what can happen when entrepreneurial students are given the opportunity to work with world-class research, develop new skills and pursue ambitious ideas beyond the programme itself. For Quantum Dice, these ideas evolved into a successful company pioneering a new paradigm of computing to help solve some of the world’s hardest problems. Their story is an inspiring reminder that the first steps into entrepreneurship can lead to careers, companies and innovations that shape the future.
