Yuval interviews Robert Wille, a computer scientist and co-founder focused on quantum computing software. They discuss the field’s transition from research to practical deployment, the need for heterogeneous and hardware-agnostic software stacks, and the integration of quantum into HPC environments. Robert explains the importance of design automation, open-source strategy, and AI-assisted development, arguing that quantum’s complex optimization challenges resemble those long solved in classical computing. Transcript Yuval: Hello Robert and thank you for joining me today. Robert: Hello Yuval, happy to be here. Yuval: So who are you and what do you do? Robert: Yeah, I’m Robert, I’m a computer scientist by training and for more than 15 years now actually involved in quantum computing. We are building software for quantum computing, which is important because it is awesome to have great quantum computing hardware and have great quantum computing applications, but you definitely need software to connect the end users to the hardware and to make these applications work. Yuval: I think you have at least two hats, right? One is an academic and the other is an entrepreneur. Could you tell us a little bit about that, please? Robert: Absolutely. By heart, I’m an academic and a researcher. I work at the Technical University of Munich and at the same time we also figured out it is great to do innovation at the university, in an academic setting, but for real impact we also need production-ready software and this cannot really be done at the university environment anymore. That’s why a little bit more than a year ago we also founded a company, and there we now take all the innovation from the academic developments and make it production-ready in a commercial context. Yuval: Since you’ve been doing it for so long, software in the context of quantum,