Quantum takes flight: reinventing drone design | The Next Big Thing

Christopher Gannatti (0:01)

All right, welcome back, everyone, to our next episode here of The Next Big Thing, summer of 2026 edition. I've got an exciting episode for us today. My name is Christopher Gannatti, a global head of research at Wisentree, and I'm joined by Abhi Chopra from BQP, and Justin Call from Modovolo.

These are extraordinarily interesting companies.

I've had the privilege of being in contact with them for a couple of months now, and a lot is happening. We're going to be discussing drones and the drone supply chain in the US. We're going to be discussing quantum computing and quantum-inspired algorithms. And it may be surprising to some people how I could be thinking I'm talking about drones and talking to a drone company and suddenly, I'm seeing an intersection in the US market between drones and quantum-inspired software, which is very interesting for WisdomTree because at WisdomTree, we've done some episodes on quantum computing. It's clearly a focus of the firm. But frequently, what you run into is you run into this boundary between, is it a science project or an experiment versus is it something real that in July-August of 2026 is actually delivering value to customers? And we're going to explain today how that answer is unequivocally yes. We're probably just scratching the surface ultimately of the ultimate value that can come. But it's been great to be able to, for me, to be able to interact with these professionals and with these firms to learn more about what quantum computing can really deliver today. But guys, I think first, what we have to do is we have to introduce the audience a bit to BQP and to Modovolo, assuming they may not have heard of these firms. So maybe Abhi, you can start off and sort of introduce a brief genesis story of BQP and ultimately what your firm looks to do.

Abhishek Chopra (2:20)

So first of all, thank you, Chris, for having us here. Super excited to be talking to you this morning. Abhi Chopra, founder and CEO of BQP. I'm an aerospace engineer and a computational scientist by trade.

So what Modovolo is doing was actually a bit of my own background during my PhD at Rensley Polytech Institute in upstate New York, where I was looking at aerodynamics and computational fluid dynamics.

Of these drones, EV dolls and vertical flights like helicopters.

And understanding the complex interactions that happen between different parts of these systems. And some of the simulations I was doing was taking six months on 250,000 computers. And I was like, wow, who's this going to be even useful for? Because companies like Modovolo have to run millions of simulations. You know, for each component that keeps adding up. So if one is taking six months, the math doesn't math up at that point of time. So my first attempt to solve this problem of slow and expensive simulation was with Oak Ridge National Lab and NVIDIA. And there, what I was looking at was, even on the largest supercomputer, by changing these code bases from legacy Fortran 77c type of codes to GPU codes, we were getting suboptimal performance improvement. And the reason for that is because the algorithm, the logic was not able to fully utilize the underlying hardware. We were only seeing 15 percent of the utilization of the hardware. So in today's context, when we are spending billions and trillions of dollars on data centers, we are losing about 85 percent of the compute power by not efficiently utilizing it. And the reason why this happens, and that's what we're going to dive deeper into, is because the math that goes behind these tools, the algorithms, are old and outdated and haven't changed in the past 40 years. So you have this new compute, but 40-year-old math, and the mismatch basically leads to inefficiencies and these slow and expensive simulation. So how BQP, we started, because of this, this became the genesis basically for me and my co-founders to come together. And what BQP is essentially doing is we are accelerating these complex modeling and simulation for mission-critical industries with the use of new logic and new algorithms coming from quantum information science. So quantum algorithms essentially.

And the goal is for us is to help companies like Modovolo who are doing transformation, engineering, and then beyond even engineering at point of time, to be able to cut their time to design, test, validate, and then hence bring the product which is much more robust, accustomed to today's environment that is needed and the need of today's markets, but also get there much, much faster. So that's in a sense what BQP does and we're an infrastructure software company based out of upstate New York.