Qolab Inc. Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder John M. Martinis has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized Martinis, John Clarke, and Michel H. Devoret for their pioneering experiments demonstrating macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in electrical circuits. Using superconducting circuits with Josephson junctions, they showed that an electrical circuit could behave as a single quantum entity, showing effects such as tunneling through barriers and discrete energy levels.

Their work provided concrete evidence that quantum mechanical effects can manifest in systems large enough to be held in the hand, laying the foundation for today’s superconducting qubit technologies.

“We are deeply honored that John’s work has received this level of recognition,” said Alan Ho, CEO of Qolab. “He is an outstanding scientist and collaborator. With his leadership, Qolab has built strong semiconductor collaborations and tackled some of the toughest challenges in developing superconducting systems. This Nobel Prize affirms the significance of our shared mission toward fault-tolerant quantum computing.”

Martinis is a distinguished physicist renowned for his groundbreaking contributions to quantum computing. With a focus on superconducting qubits, he has been at the forefront of developing high-fidelity qubits essential for scalable quantum processors. Prior to founding Qolab, Martinis played a key role at Google, leading the hardware team that demonstrated quantum supremacy — a quantum computer outperforming the world’s largest supercomputer at a computationally challenging task.