Like many in the last few years, the pandemic prompted Abhishek Chopra to consider: Life is so uncertain. Why wait?
In summer 2022, he graduated with his master’s in aerospace, aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and opted to forego his Ph.D. for now and focus on his startup BosonQ Psi full time.
He moved to Buffalo because he has family in the Buffalo and Rochester areas, and knew it was a good tech hub with available help from universities.
“The kind of people I’ve met here just in the past six months, the community is young and eager to do something,” he said. “That’s why I chose to be here.”
Founded in September 2020, his startup is a software-as-a-service that uses quantum computing to speed up virtual simulations. CEO Chopra started the business with Jash Minocha, his cousin, and Rut Lineswala, his friend from Rutgers. The team leads about 27 employees across the globe, many in India.
Now Chopra has decided to move headquarters from India to Buffalo and is looking at co-working spaces.
His workers aren’t planning to move to Buffalo, though some will travel between India and Buffalo. He expects to add about 50 tech workers specializing in simulation and computation and 50 software engineers within the next few years.
Chopra said he's especially excited about the prospect of hiring local software engineers.
“We are a SaaS company, so we need our platform to grow,” he said. “There cannot be a better place than Upstate New York because of the abundance of talent for software engineering.”
The startup recently released an alpha version of its software and is getting feedback from individual users such as professors and simulation engineers and plans to launch its beta product within the next eight months.
The business is also doing pilots and proof of concepts with five global corporate companies in the automotive, aerospace, auto and gas industries, with another 10 businesses in the pipeline.
The startup closed a roughly $525,000 pre-seed round in April 2022 and launched a seed round late last year. The business aims to raise about $2 million.
The focus is commercialization with the help of more partnerships. The startup has infrastructure partners such as IMB’s Quantum Computing Network which gives access to hardware to test, develop and deploy its cloud-based solution. The company is also channel partners with Data Conservancy, which will help the startup add customers to its pipeline.
Chopra appreciates the eager and helpful local startup community. People, whether they’re founders or work with universities or accelerator programs, want to support each other.
“I think there’s enough in the ecosystem to make it one of the biggest startup hubs as we go along in our journey,” he said.
