Ilana Wisby, The Founding Chief Executive Who Took British Quantum Hardware Commercial

Ilana Wisby is a British experimental physicist who spent about six years as the founding chief executive of Oxford Quantum Circuits, the University of Oxford spin-out known as OQC. She took the company from Peter Leek’s laboratory design for a superconducting qubit to a business selling time on its own machines over the cloud. She stepped down from the post in May 2024. Her training was in the laboratory rather than the boardroom. She holds a doctorate in experimental quantum physics from Royal Holloway, University of London. She carried out much of that research at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, on superconducting circuits of the same family her company went on to sell. Under her leadership OQC raised more than one hundred million dollars across two funding rounds, according to Cambridge Innovation Capital, the firm that has since hired her. The same announcement says the company’s valuation rose fifty-five fold in that time. That money paid for the move from prototypes on a bench to machines a customer could book, which is the step where most hardware start-ups fail. Since 10 July 2026 she has been an entrepreneur in residence at Cambridge Innovation Capital, where she says she is…