Connected DMV Announces Platform Partners for the 2026 Global Industry Challenge
D-Wave Joins Aqora and qBraid Platform Partners, as Challenge Builds on a landmark 2025 and looks ahead to its next global sprint
Connected DMV, the operator of Quantum World Congress, today announced the first confirmed platform partners for the 2026 Global Industry Challenge (GIC), marking the next phase of a global program that has rapidly become one of the most ambitious and internationally diverse efforts to apply quantum technologies to real-world industry problems.
The 2026 Challenge will once again be delivered through Aqora and qBraid, providing a unified front-end for challenge orchestration, collaboration, and access to quantum resources. Connected DMV also announced D-Wave as a new computing platform provider for 2026, expanding the range of quantum architectures available to participants worldwide.
The announcement follows strong momentum from CES 2026, where the next chapter of the Global Industry Challenge was unveiled during Quantum Means Business, a half-day program presented by Connected DMV and Quantum World Congress, and builds on the unprecedented success of the Challenge’s 2025 edition.
“The Global Industry Challenge was created to move quantum out of the lab and into the world,” said George Thomas, President and CEO, Connected DMV. “What we saw in 2025—global participation, real industry engagement, and deployable solutions—confirmed the model works. In 2026, we’re expanding the platform foundation to go even further.”
A PROVEN MODEL: THE GLOBAL INDUSTRY CHALLENGE IN 2025
The 2025 Global Industry Challenge demonstrated the power of bringing industry-defined problems directly to the global quantum community. More than 700 applicants from over 60 countries participated in a multi-phase competition that spanned six continents and culminated in live winner announcements on the main stage at Quantum World Congress 2025.
Participants worked across high-value sectors including financial services, infrastructure, risk management and insurance, and life sciences, delivering solutions for global organizations such as the World Bank Group, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, MITRE, and leading research institutions.
By the final round, 28 finalist teams from 17 countries delivered submissions across five industry challenges, showcasing how quantum and quantum-adjacent technologies—often combined with AI—can address real operational, analytical, and societal challenges today.
Equally important, the Challenge emphasized democratized access: competitors ranged from startups and academic researchers to industry professionals and students, underscoring the program’s role in expanding the global quantum talent pipeline.
THE PLATFORM FOUNDATION POWERING GLOBAL PARTICIPATION
Aqora: Orchestrating global innovation at scale
Aqora provides the challenge infrastructure that makes a program of this scale possible. Designed for complex scientific and technological competitions, Aqora enables structured challenge design, transparent evaluation, collaboration workflows, and global participation across time zones and disciplines.
As the front-end orchestration platform for the Global Industry Challenge, Aqora enables industry challenge providers to engage directly with a worldwide community of innovators—while ensuring rigor, fairness, and scalability across every phase of the program.
“The Global Industry Challenge exemplifies what’s possible when ambitious industry problems are paired with a truly global innovation platform. Aqora is proud to support a program that prioritizes openness, rigor, and real-world relevance,” said Jannes Stubbemann, Co-Founder & CEO, Aqora.
qBraid: Enabling access across quantum ecosystems
qBraid serves as the quantum access layer of the Global Industry Challenge, allowing participants to develop, test, and run workloads across multiple quantum hardware providers and simulators through a single environment.
Boasting 25,000+ users globally, qBraid reduces the friction typically associated with quantum experimentation—such as hardware-specific tooling and fragmented workflows—enabling participants to focus on algorithm development, performance exploration, and problem-solving rather than infrastructure.
This unified access model has been critical to the Challenge’s global reach, enabling participation from teams with varying levels of quantum experience and technical background.
“What makes the Global Industry Challenge unique is its emphasis on hands-on experimentation at scale. qBraid is proud to help lower barriers so innovators around the world can engage meaningfully with real quantum systems,” said Kanav Setia, CEO, qBraid.
D-Wave: Expanding architectural diversity and near-term application pathways
D-Wave brings a distinct and complementary approach to the Global Industry Challenge ecosystem. As a pioneer in quantum computing and a leader in annealing quantum computing, and the only company building both annealing and gate-model systems,, D-Wave has focused on delivering systems that address real-world optimization and decision-making problems today.
By joining the 2026 Challenge as a computing platform provider, D-Wave expands the architectural diversity available to participants—encouraging teams to explore how different quantum paradigms perform across specific problem classes and industry contexts.
This addition reflects the Challenge’s core philosophy: that progress toward practical quantum value will require multiple architectures, multiple approaches, and rigorous comparison grounded in real use cases.
“The Global Industry Challenge aligns with D-Wave’s long-standing focus on practical quantum applications. We’re excited to support a program that gives innovators the opportunity to test ideas against real problems using real quantum systems,” said Allison Schwartz, senior vice president of global government relations and public affairs at D-Wave. “Understanding the best use cases for quantum computing, and providing access to commercial systems to build the talent of the future are two main components for expediting quantum adoption.”
LOOKING AHEAD TO THE 2026 GLOBAL INDUSTRY CHALLENGE
The 2026 Global Industry Challenge builds directly on the foundation established in 2025, with an expanded platform ecosystem and a continued focus on real-world impact, global participation, and workforce development.
Key milestones for the 2026 Challenge include:
Participant registration and Challenge launch early March, 2026
Award ceremony at Quantum World Congress 2026
Industry challenge providers, additional platform partners, and detailed use cases will be announced as part of a rolling series of updates in the months ahead.
A GROWING GLOBAL EFFORT
As Connected DMV continues to scale the Global Industry Challenge, the program will remain a central pillar of its broader mission: accelerating the transition from quantum promise to practical deployment by convening industry, researchers, startups, and students within a single collaborative framework.
Organizations interested in participating—as platform providers, industry challenge sponsors, or competitors—are encouraged to engage early.