Quantum Canada

Vern Brownell had spent 11 years at Goldman Sachs (GS) as the New York bank’s chief technology officer. He had grown cynical from startups pitching for a sliver of the billion dollars a year Goldman spends on technology.

D-Wave Systems is a Canadian startup in the nascent field of quantum computing.

“Once I came out here and saw what they were doing, I said ‘I’ve got to do this,’” Brownell said in a recent telephone interview. “I had never seen anything that had the potential to disrupt the computing industry the way this had.”

Four years later, Brownell is D-Wave’s chief executive officer, the firm has secured more than C$100 million ($95 million) in investment from backers including Goldman (GS) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN). founder Jeff Bezos and counts Lockheed Martin Co. (LMT), and a lab run by Google Inc (GOOG). and NASA as its customers.

Along with BlackBerry smartphone inventor Mike Lazaridis, who has poured nearly half a billion dollars into quantum science in Waterloo, Ontario, D-Wave is creating a second act for a Canadian technology sector known more recently for Nortel Networks Corp (NRTLQ).’s bankruptcy and BlackBerry’s struggles.

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