Our Vision for the NSF Tech Labs Initiative

At Unitary Foundation, our mission has always been to ensure that the quantum ecosystem benefits the most people. The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) new Tech Labs initiative opens up an exciting new mechanism to lay the foundations of our software ecosystem, keeping it free, accessible, and heterogeneous.

What are the NSF Tech Labs?

The NSF recently announced the Tech Labs initiative through its Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP). This program represents a shift in how the federal government supports innovation. Rather than focusing solely on early-stage academic research, Tech Labs are designed to bridge the gap between laboratory discovery and real-world, commercialized technology.

These labs are meant to be agile, multidisciplinary hubs that focus on scale-up and translation. They aim to provide the resources—funding, infrastructure, and personnel—necessary to take “deep tech” from a proof-of-concept to a robust, reliable platform that can support entire industries. By fostering system-level innovation, the NSF hopes to secure U.S. leadership in critical emerging fields like AI, biotechnology, and, most importantly for our community, quantum information science.

Why This Matters Now

Progress in quantum technology is reaching a critical inflection point. We are moving past the era of pure physics breakthroughs and into an era of engineering challenges. However, the current ecosystem is fragmented. We see a landscape of vendor-specific stacks, bespoke compilers, and non-interoperable runtimes.

This fragmentation creates vendor lock-in and slows down the entire field. Without a shared, trusted software foundation, we risk slower capability diffusion compared to other fields. We believe a Tech Lab is required now to address this market failure—creating a platform that private companies alone cannot justify building, but that the entire industry needs to thrive.

Private and public investment in quantum is at a record high, scaling to $8Bn+ private venture investment in 2025 and with large scale USG programs like the DARPA QBI program and the DOE National Quantum Initiative Science Research Centers. Despite this investment, the software bottleneck persists. This is because the bottleneck fits in a gap between traditional academic grants, vendor roadmaps, or venture-backed startups. It requires a mission-driven, full-time, multidisciplinary, hardware vendor-independent team operating with autonomy, a long-term horizon, and milestone-based accountability.

With the advancements in the field’s infrastructure and hardware developers beginning to demonstrate advantage for end users, it is no longer premature to have a uniform layer of software on top of heterogeneous hardware. Instead, this opportunity will allow the cross-platform hardware R&D work done within the quantum industry and academia to reach the market quicker and more cost effectively. Siloed roadmaps would inevitably lead to significant delays in the development of operating systems and pose significant disadvantages to US leadership in quantum technology. Furthermore, according to a recent study by the Harvard Business School, existence of strong open source tools has been shown to reduce the costs of software for companies by 3.5x, while investments totaling $4.15B in open source tools has generated $8.8T in value across technology fields, creating strong incentive for ongoing industry support for Tech Labs projects such as this. To that end, Tech Labs IP rights should be structured to allow for open source contributions, while maintaining flexibility for those who would like to conduct further research, or pursue new start-up entities.

Our Idea: An Open Quantum Operating System

Our vision is to design, build, and deploy what we call a quantum Linux: a shared, open, production-grade system software layer for hybrid quantum–classical–AI computing. Just as Linux catalyzed decades of innovation in classical computing by providing a stable, common foundation, an open quantum operating system will:

Unlock Interoperability: Enabling hardware platforms, cloud providers, and researchers to work together seamlessly.
Reduce Friction: Lowering the barrier to entry for application developers and startups.
Secure National Infrastructure: Providing auditable, transparent software for defense and critical infrastructure.

Why Unitary Foundation?

The UF community isn’t just theorists; we are builders. Since 2018, Unitary Foundation has operated in the exact institutional gap that the NSF Tech Labs are designed to fill. Our credentials include:

Proven Stewardship: We maintain the largest global open quantum software community, with over 5,800 developers and 400+ active contributors, and long-term projects like QuTiP.
Global Impact: Through our microgrant program, we have supported 130+ open-source projects, resulting in widely adopted libraries, startups, and follow-on funding.
Neutral Governance: We have a track record of convening competing stakeholders—including IBM, AWS, Microsoft, and IonQ—to work toward the common good.
Technical Excellence: Our internal technical team stewards essential projects like Mitiq (error mitigation), Metriq (benchmarking), and the long-term maintenance of QuTiP.
Cross-sector Partnerships: Our work has been supported by partners across academia, industry, government, private foundations and individuals.

We operate today in the institutional gap that NSF Tech Labs are designed to fill and this informs our recommendations here. We see the most effective management and structure for the Tech Lab, to ensure speed, operational autonomy, and best use of resources, as an entity housed within the non-profit with full time leadership and a technical team wholly devoted to achieving the goals for each phase of the Tech Labs project, with the ability to spin out into an independent entity if needed for sustained growth.

How a Tech Lab Can Impact Our Community

This initiative isn’t just about big-picture policy; it’s about the researchers, hackers, and builders who make up the Unitary Foundation community. Here is how a Quantum Tech Lab will directly benefit our grantees:

Seamless Integration: Currently, many of our micrograntees build brilliant tools that struggle to find users because they are “islands” in a fragmented ecosystem. A standardized “Quantum Linux” means your tool—be it a new compiler or an error mitigation technique—can be integrated into a common stack used by major hardware providers.
A Career Pipeline: We envision the Tech Lab as a destination for the talent we discover through microgrants. It provides a path for early-career practitioners to transition from a single project to contributing to national-scale infrastructure.
Reduced Development Costs: By providing robust, open-source “plumbing” (like runtimes and drivers), we allow you to focus your energy on high-level innovation rather than reinventing the wheel.
Sustainability: One of the hardest parts of open source development is maintenance after the initial grant ends. The Tech Lab model provides the long-term stewardship needed to ensure your contributions remain useful and maintained for years to come.
Community Building: A large-scale open source project like a Tech Lab will provide new opportunities to gather, learn, critique, and contribute to field-defining projects. With Unitary Foundation’s ongoing community initiatives, we will be able to build a more connected and cohesive ecosystem.

How Program Design Can Help Tech Labs Succeed

Program design should emphasize potential for impact over restrictions on size or structure. Partnerships should be enabled by the program structure, but not demanded if unnecessary for the ultimate de-risking of the technology in question. Further, milestones should ensure that new standards, products, and services can emerge organically from each Tech Lab. And IP and contract rules and regulations should help this effort, not hinder it.

The Tech Labs initiative provides a unique opportunity to pursue systems changing projects with more freedom than traditional grantmaking programs. As such, we believe team eligibility should be as broad as possible. Each field has its own unique needs that will be best suited by an entity tailored to address them, rather than conform to any universal model. An emphasis should be placed on team capacity, expertise, ability to execute, and potential to scale, above other eligibility criteria. Team independence will be paramount for Tech Labs projects to move quickly, take advantage of new opportunities, and respond to the needs of the fields they serve. Independence can be defined here as the ability to make new programmatic decisions that serve the Tech Lab’s stated goals, the ability to hire new team members, and the ability to form new strategic partnerships that serve the Tech Lab goals, without unnecessary hindrance from bureaucratic overhead.