QAI Ventures, a venture investor and ecosystem builder focused on quantum technologies and advanced AI, is accelerating its expansion into Asia Pacific. Lisa Schröder, accelerator director for Singapore, said the city-state offers the regulatory clarity, technical depth and institutional appetite needed to advance early quantum and AI capabilities into commercial pilots. “We see Singapore as an anchor,” she said, noting that the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has already signalled that quantum-related cyber risks should feature in institutional roadmaps Founded in Switzerland, QAI has spent the past two and a half years building accelerator hubs in Basel and Calgary. Schröder noted that this foundation — shaped by close ties with universities, national labs and early deep-tech investors — gives the firm the technical rigour to evaluate frontier technologies, while Singapore provides the commercial environment to introduce them into regulated markets. At the Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF) 2025, Schröder outlined where quantum and AI offer near-term value for financial institutions, what deep-tech founders need to work effectively with regulated industries, and how Singapore is becoming a launchpad for Europe–Asia commercialisation. Where quantum meets finance: optimisation and modelling Schröder sees quantum’s near-term traction in simulation and quantum machine learning — areas directly aligned to financial-sector workload pressures. For banks, this translates into more sophisticated approaches to risk modelling and fraud detection. Concrete demand signals emerged from QAI’s recent co-hosted quantum–AI hackathon with DBS, where teams explored fraud-pattern recognition, ESG-aware optimisation under regulatory constraints, liquidity-risk modelling and counterparty credit-risk scenario generation. She highlighted growing interest in quantum-inspired software — algorithms shaped by quantum principles but deployable on classical hardware — because these already deliver measurable performance advantages. Schröder cited Multiverse’s pilot with Moody’s Analytics, where quantum-inspired optimisers were tested on computationally heavy risk and valuation workflows, as evidence that “global institutions are running early production-grade experiments” without waiting for scalable quantum processors. Beyond QAI’s portfolio, Schröder noted that global banks such as HSBC and JPMorgan have been actively experimenting with quantum technologies through collaborations with IBM and QC Ware — early signals that leading institutions are preparing defensive and offensive quantum strategies in parallel. Turning research into venture-ready solutions QAI has built a structured model to move frontier research into institutions. Early experimentation begins with hackathons that validate problem statements and surface technical talent. Accelerator hubs in Switzerland, Canada and Singapore prepare founders to work with regulated institutions by sharpening product–market fit, investor readiness and early customer engagement. A new Singapore-based venture-building programme will support researchers commercialising laboratory work. With “only about 650 quantum startups globally,” Schröder said QAI wants to help assemble stronger founding teams and prepare them for capital-intensive scaling — a critical bottleneck for financial-services adoption. Schröder also stressed that hardware maturity remains uncertain. “Hardware is still debatable… I’m not able to give any indication on the time scale,” she said, adding that quantum-inspired software is gaining more immediate commercial traction. What FSIs need from deep-tech founders Schröder emphasised that commercial readiness in quantum and advanced AI is multidimensional. Beyond technical robustness, startups must show customer traction and the ability to scale across markets with limited early adopters. Rigorous due diligence remains essential because quantum capabilities vary widely. She said QAI often brings in external advisors because “it probably takes a few iterations and a few experts to assess whether a technology is ready”, given the diversity of quantum approaches even within financial services. Institutional engagement introduces its own friction. “It always takes a long time until we reach the right person within a financial institution,” she said. Banks need clear articulation of the business problem, clarity about internal ownership, and confidence that any solution can integrate into legacy environments without compromising compliance or operational continuity. “Drafting out that value proposition for financial institutions is still what ventures are struggling with,” she adds. As institutions mature, Schröder expects them to draw on more specialist expertise — from quantum physicists to quantum computing, quantum communication and other quantum-technology specialists, alongside finance-domain experts — to map techniques to specific business and risk-management workflows. MAS guidance is shaping FSI priorities If optimisation and modelling are driving commercial pull, MAS’ quantum-risk advisories are delivering a parallel regulatory push. Rather than setting prescriptive timelines, MAS has taken a risk-based approach — asking institutions to assess quantum-related cyber risks, identify data vulnerable to future decryption, and incorporate post-quantum cryptography (PQC) into long-term technology roadmaps. These advisories reinforce the need to prepare for “harvest-now, decrypt-later” risks and future hybrid-cryptography transitions. According to Schröder, this regulatory clarity strengthens defensive planning while giving banks the confidence to explore quantum- and AI-enabled optimisation and analytics in a structured way. She added that institutions across Asia — including firms such as SoftBank — have shown strong interest in experimenting with quantum- and AI-enabled optimisation tools aligned with broader AI-first strategies. Building a Europe–Asia corridor for financial-sector innovation Schröder stressed that quantum and AI are not competing paradigms but mutually reinforcing. “In our case, QAI stands for Quantum plus AI,” she said. She highlighted that hybrid approaches — from quantum-inspired neural networks to quantum-derived model-compression techniques — could reduce false positives in fraud detection and improve the efficiency of advanced AI models long before large-scale quantum hardware arrives. At SFF, QAI showcased four European portfolio companies — QCentroid (quantum and advanced-computing cloud workflows), Wave Photonics (photonic design automation), Semicon (materials for quantum and photonic chips) and Multiverse (quantum-inspired optimisation and analytics) — signalling its intent to use Singapore as a bridge into Asia Pacific. Supported by Enterprise Singapore, the firm is facilitating institutional engagements and expanding links across Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. For Schröder, the next decade will determine whether Asia becomes the first region where quantum and AI meaningfully intersect with financial services — and argues that Singapore, with its regulatory clarity and deep-tech appetite, is where this commercial shift has begun to take shape.
