Alexander Regnat is co-founder and managing director of kiutra, a Munich-based company developing magnetic refrigeration systems for quantum computing and research applications.
Who are you and what does kiutra do?
I’m Alexander, one of the co-founders and the managing director of kiutra since its incorporation in 2018. I’m a physicist by training and did my Ph.D. at the Technical University of Munich, where I met my co-founders Jan, who is now our CTO, and Tomek, our COO.
At the university, we were working on novel intermetallic compounds that showed exotic low-temperature behavior and magnetic phases. We investigated how these materials could be used for memory applications and quantum technologies. To do these experiments, you need ultra-low temperatures, which are a standard tool in materials research.
We started building our own cooling devices because we saw the limitations of traditional gas-based cooling systems. We developed solid-state magnetic refrigerators and found it was a super elegant, smooth way of working that could be heavily automated. We no longer had to run to Garching, which is about 15 kilometers north of Munich, to refill liquefied gases on weekends. You could run your experiments from your couch at home.
When quantum computing started taking off, we realized that everybody working in quantum needs cryogenic cooling. There’s a growing bottleneck if quantum should be rolled out at industrial scale. You can’t do this using traditional gas-based cooling. That’s when we decided to spin out from the university to commercialize what we initially developed for our own research.
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How is your approach different from traditional quantum computer refrigeration?
All quantum technologies and qubit modalities require ultra-low temperature cooling. The leading platforms based on superconducting qubits or spin qubits need millikelvin temperatures, which are a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, far colder than outer space.
The traditional way to reach these temperatures is by circulating a mixture of liquefied helium-4 and helium-3. While helium-4 is expensive but available, helium-3 is extremely scarce. It’s a rare isotope with very few suppliers in the U.S. and Russia. The global annual output is just some 10,000 liters of gas per year because it comes from a nuclear supply chain. The helium-3 we use today originates mostly from military sources — nuclear weapons — and very few civilian sources where tritium decays to helium-3 over about 12.5 years.
This helium-3 based cooling can’t easily scale to meet growing demand in quantum tech. The scarcity, cost, scalability issues, supply chain problems, and technical complexity all create major challenges.
We use a fundamentally different approach: solid-state refrigeration technology using the magnetocaloric effect. In our devices, we have solid materials that warm up when you apply a magnetic field and cool down when you remove it. By demagnetizing these magnetocaloric materials, we can reach millikelvin temperatures while completely avoiding helium-3.
Since we’re only using magnetic fields generated electrically by electromagnets, it’s essentially an electric way of cooling. It’s like comparing a traditional combustion engine car running on liquid fuel to an electric car. You’re no longer relying on rare, expensive fuels, and you avoid complexity. Controlling and setting temperatures is much easier. You don’t need helium leak-tight pumps. The reliance, hassle, and associated costs can all be avoided by switching to solid-state refrigeration.
How do you think about the market for your refrigeration systems today versus where it will be in ten years?
Quantum computing is still in its early stages, and advancing cryogenics will be instrumental in enabling quantum to become an industrial technology. Today, the largest part of the market is centered around low-temperature characterization and quantum R&D. Most customers requiring cryogenic temperatures don’t need them to operate full-stack quantum computers because we still have just a few machines. It’s still a young technology, but the field is advancing rapidly, and we are quickly moving toward a mature industrial market.
At this stage, there are many vendors, manufacturers, research institutes, startups, and corporations working in applied quantum technologies. They’re all developing new chips and components, so they have a strong need for cryogenic temperatures to develop and commercialize their technologies.
We’re currently focused on providing specialized equipment to facilitate and accelerate this quantum R&D, testing, and characterization. Looking ahead, however, we anticipate an even larger market for the operation of full-stack quantum computers. Every quantum computer, quantum communication repeater node, and other quantum devices will require a cryogenic platform to operate. It will be a multibillion-euro market that strongly depends on ultra-low temperature cooling.
We’re already building larger systems for this future. While we started with compact, specialized devices for R&D and characterization, we’re simultaneously working on large-scale magnetocaloric refrigeration devices that can serve as operating platforms capable of hosting quantum chips and running quantum computers beyond the lab in real-world data center environments.
Where are your customers based and how strong is Europe in quantum computing?
It’s a very international and well-connected scene, still closely tied to the scientific research community. We have customers almost all over the world. We started in Germany and have customers throughout the European Union and European countries. We have customers in the US, we’ve shipped systems to Japan, and we’re constantly growing our customer base through direct sales and distribution partners in the Asia-Pacific market.
We’re covering the whole emerging quantum ecosystem: large research institutes, universities, startups, small and medium-sized enterprises, corporates, and even big tech. We provide equipment for use with all kinds of quantum modalities. Most of our customers work in superconducting quantum devices and qubits, but we also have customers working on spin qubit systems, trapped ion chips, photonic systems, and more. This shows how fundamental cooling is for the whole quantum industry.
How does your technology scale as quantum computers get larger?
That’s exactly the big advantage of solid-state cooling. In stark contrast to helium-3 based cooling, we don’t have a scalability issue. We’re using solids that are commonly available and cheap. Some of them you can even buy in your next-door pharmacy for a couple of cents. This is completely different from helium-3, which you can only get in small amounts and from very selected suppliers. This is particularly important for Europe because we don’t have any helium-3 suppliers here at all. We source helium-3 exclusively from North America at the moment.
From a technical perspective, since the complexity isn’t as large as in dilution refrigeration based on helium-3, we can build highly modular cooling systems. We’re more easily scalable in terms of modularity. Building larger quantum computers will require more cooling power and more space. If you want to achieve this with standard cooling technology, you always end up building completely new refrigerators. With our technology, we envision individual cooling modules. You can add more cooling modules later to allow operation of a larger or changing payload. Our technology eventually will be able to grow with the growing computing architectures, making it more sustainable compared to traditional cooling methodologies.
How do you define deep tech?
Deep tech is about building a commercial solution right at the intersection of science and the real world, providing hopefully some impact on the real world. To my understanding, compared to other startups that aren’t deep tech, it requires long-term commitment, typically multidisciplinary collaboration and expertise. It’s more like a marathon compared to other ventures. For me, as a physicist, I believe it’s about leveraging physics, materials research, and engineering to build something new, address new markets, and create new capabilities.