Mr. Karnika E. Yashwant with Peter Shor, founder of Shor’s Algorithm at Quantum.Tech World 2026
Mr. Karnika E Yashwant chairing the Quantum Comms track at Quantum.Tech World
BOSTON, MA, UNITED STATES, August 14, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- At Quantum.Tech World 2026 in Boston, where Peter Shor delivered the opening keynote and 2025 Nobel Physics laureate John Martinis headlined, entrepreneur and investor Karnika E. Yashwant kept asking the people building the industry the same thing: when can you actually do something with this?
"Nobody could answer that, and these are the people building it," said Karnika E. Yashwant, who served as a track chair at the event. "Quantum doesn't work until it works. When it works, it works. So everybody is waiting for it to work, and in the meantime they're creating different architectures, different strategies, intermediate solutions. Algorithm simulations on GPUs, errors included, just to make some things function today."
The event drew over 1,000 senior decision-makers, heads of national labs, and representation from US Department of Energy National Laboratories. Karnika E. Yashwant, better known in the industry as Mr KEY, engaged with a room that included Shor, whose algorithm made quantum's threat to modern cryptography impossible to ignore, and Martinis, one of the foundational figures in superconducting quantum systems. Directors and senior leaders from Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, NIST, DARPA and the Department of Energy were present, along with quantum leads from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, HSBC, Citi, JP Morgan, Mastercard, Boeing, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, NASA, Roche, Moderna and AT&T.
