PsiQuantum locks in Victor Peng as permanent CEO and hires two outside executives as it scales past the startup phase
PsiQuantum named Victor Peng permanent CEO, five months after his interim appointment, and simultaneously hired Rob Soderbery (formerly EVP at Western Digital, senior roles at Cisco) as Executive VP and Sriram Sitaraman (formerly CIO at Synopsys) as Chief Information Officer. Soderbery will work on PsiQuantum's silicon photonics platform and its use in AI networking infrastructure, not just quantum computing; Sitaraman will run global IT and security. No compensation, equity, or organizational chart details were disclosed.
PsiQuantum is privately held, so leadership hires are one of the few real-time signals investors get on execution capacity. Hiring a semiconductor/storage operations exec and pointing him at "AI networking infrastructure" alongside quantum computing is a tell: PsiQuantum may be building a revenue-generating side business in photonics to bridge the gap before utility-scale quantum computers exist.
Bringing in operators from Western Digital, Cisco, and Synopsys, not quantum physicists, at this stage says PsiQuantum's constraint right now is manufacturing and IT scale-up, not more research talent. That's a reasonable read given its silicon photonics approach rides on standard semiconductor fabs, but it's also an admission that shipping hardware is now the hard part.