Michael Förtsch

Michael Foertsch is the founder and CEO of Q.ANT. The company develops photonic processors that address the physical limits of today's chip architectures, enabling a step change in efficiency for complex AI and HPC workloads.

Q.ANT's photonic processors eliminate the memory wall, by handling native non-linear computation and cutting data movement at the main bottleneck now limiting compute performance. The company's second-generation processors already run in HPC-data centers, backed by a growing IP portfolio of more than 30 patent filings, five already granted.

Foertsch founded Q.ANT in 2018 out of his role at TRUMPF, where he advised the executive board on strategy and business development, scaling it into a 100-plus-person deep-tech company. He holds a PhD in Physics from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, researched at NIST, and has been named Germany's Manager of the Year and to Capital's Top 40 Under 40.