Podcast with Sumit Kapur, CEO of Zapata Quantum

Yuval’s guest today is Sumit Kapur, CEO of Zapata Quantum. They speak about the company’s remarkable phoenix-from-the-ashes story — surviving a quantum winter and a failed SPAC to rebuild as a focused quantum applications company. They discuss Zapata’s partnerships, their landmark cancer research published on the cover of Nature Biotech, and Zapata’s work on using agentic AI to accelerate quantum resource estimation. Sumit walks through the quantum journey for enterprises, from Quantum Application Intelligence to Quantum Application Engineering, shares his view on how the challenges in quantum have shifted, and much more. Zapata’s 2024 SPAC deal brought in almost no equity capital but added over $20 million in liabilities, forcing the company to restructure at the end of 2024 and rebuild. Zapata’s KRAS-targeting cancer research with Dana-Farber, University of Toronto, and St. Jude’s was named a top 10 paper of 2025 and put on the cover of Nature Biotech in December 2025. Zapata is working with NVIDIA to apply agentic AI to quantum resource estimation, aiming to compress a process that took over a year of PhD-level work during the DARPA benchmarking program. Kapur splits the enterprise quantum journey into Quantum Application Intelligence (deciding which applications matter and when) and…