Scale-up wants to de-bottleneck quantum puzzles in R&D

Here’s a puzzle: Why do companies like L’Oréal, Pfizer, BASF and DuPont spend millions discovering new molecules with interesting properties? Answer: Because new molecules are the basis for their new beauty products, crop sprays, medicines and high-performance materials. Now, an Innovation District Copenhagen-located scale-up, Molecular Quantum Solutions, are promising easy to use quantum chemistry calculations, that will make molecular R&D more accessible. By Jes Andersen.

Replacing lab-hours by the thousands

Quantum chemistry computing can replace hundreds, or even thousands of hours in the laboratory. The catch is that you need to be a high-level scientist to use most of the available software. Actually, there are two catches. Running high performance computing-calculations on services such as AWS or Google Cloud, is fiendishly expensive. The founder of Molecular Quantum Solutions, a chemical engineer, built the company to solve his own pains.

I wanted to solve as many pains in R&D as possible. To make it easier for smaller companies to do their own research and development. So far, we have succeeded in making calculations 47 times cheaper than on Google’s cloud based HPC, and to build a software that is as easy as getting ChatGPT or Claude to write a birthday card”: Mark Nicholas Jones, CEO, Molecular Quantum Solutions.

Infrastructure agnostic solution

The company’s first product, Cebule™, is actually a suite of interlinked tools. A research agent which is an online AI assistant that gives you recipes for your necessary simulation experiments based on simple text questions. A database with more than 200 million geometry optimized molecules securing that power hungry servers are used more sustainably. Finally the Cebule™ Engine, which holds a library of computational models that work across processing units for classical-, AI- and quantum-computers. In other words, for CPU’s GPU’s and QPU’s.

Our entire solution is cloud-based and can be deployed securely on-premise, so our customers can access it with any IT infrastructure they want. We make sure that the calculations are routed to the hardware/processing unit that suits the problem best. Right now, that means classical computers, so either CPU’s or GPU’s, but we also have algorithms for a quantum computers’ QPU’s”: Kristin Bjorg Arnardottir, Lead for Quantum Technology Development, Molecular Quantum Solutions

Quantum computing is already here

This last might be the reason why Molecular Quantum Solutions chose to settle in the start-up community Quantum Denmark this year. Here, they have found office space in University of Copenhagen’s original Niels Bohr Institute. The community is committed to helping companies based on quantum research launch and scale globally.

A lot of legacy companies are trying to predict the right time to enter the quantum race as if quantum computing were something that will happen in the future. As far as I am concerned, it is already happening. It is gradually being implemented, and if you were to hibernate for the next three years, you would wake up to discover quantum computing being used all over the place”: Mark Nicholas Jones, CEO, Molecular Quantum Solutions

Rollercoaster to robustness

Jones launched his company in December 2019. Today it has a portfolio of five patents, five staff spread across the globe and revenue doubled from 2024 to 2025 in the six digit range. Getting this far was anything but simple, though.

The company has almost run out of money three or four times. I had to cut my own salary and also staff, so it gave me some peace of mind to see revenues rise. It has been a roller coaster ride, but this ride has taught me to be careful with accounting and budgeting. This has helped MQS to be a very lean and robust company”: Mark Nicholas Jones, CEO, Molecular Quantum Solutions

Automating the entire R&D-chain

Enterprise software for quantum chemistry is not the end of the road, as far as Jones is concerned. With the company’s next funding round, his goal is to build a fully robot-driven chemistry lab. After that he envisions growing a highly automated contract research service, where an automated laboratory will produce data and molecular products based on insights from Cebule™ and the self-driven lab is also operated by Cebule™.