Biography

Michael Förtsch is founder and CEO of Q.ANT, a start-up developing photonic quantum technologies. Q.ANT's product developments include sensors for attitude control of satellites as well as for human-machine interaction and photonic quantum computing. After studying mathematics and physics, Michael Förtsch earned his doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Light in Erlangen. For his scientific achievements in the field of quantum information processing he was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal by the Max Planck Society After an international research stay at the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Boulder, he started as a strategy consultant at TRUMPF GmbH + Co. KG in Stuttgart in 2015. In 2016, he became the personal assistant to the CTO and vice chairman of the management board of the TRUMPF Group. Seeing the potential that photonic quantum technologies offers, he founded Q.ANT in 2018 as a spin-off from TRUMPF.