7 GTM Lessons from Selling Quantum Technology to the Department of Defense

7 GTM Lessons from Selling Quantum Technology to the Department of Defense

Most founders building deep tech eventually face a decision: should we sell to the government? The question comes wrapped in anxiety about bureaucracy, long sales cycles, and navigating a system designed to resist innovation. Matthew Kinsella, CEO of Infleqtion, didn’t have the luxury of avoidance. When you’re commercializing quantum technology that keeps time a thousand times more accurately than existing standards, the Department of Defense isn’t just a potential customer—it’s the market.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Matthew shared the specific tactics Infleqtion used to go from university research to an $11 million government contract. His candor—”it is a very different go to market motion than anything I have experienced before”—makes the lessons more valuable.

Lesson 1: Product-Market Fit in Deep Tech Means Deployability

Technical superiority alone won’t win defense contracts. Infleqtion’s advantage came from solving an operational constraint. While competitors built systems requiring “giant cryogenic freezers,” Infleqtion’s neutral atoms technology “froze atoms by shooting them with lasers.”

The strategic implication? Their quantum clocks could be “field deployed, they can be ruggedized, and most importantly, they can be cost down and shrunk.” This wasn’t just a technical feature—it changed who could buy and where they could deploy. Data center-only solutions can’t solve GPS-denied navigation in combat zones.

The lesson: understand the operational environment your customer operates in, not just technical specifications.

Lesson 2: SBIRs Are Relationship Infrastructure, Not Just Capital

“The easiest thing to do, if you’re a very early stage startup, is to respond to calls for what are called SBIRs,” Matthew explains. These grants range from $100,000 to $2 million on “time and materials plus like a 10% fee.”

But treating SBIRs as purely funding misses their strategic value. “The most important thing about it, honestly, is that you’re building the relationship with those buyers of the technology.” Infleqtion’s Ticker clock started as a DARPA SBIR, validating demand and building trust with program officers.

That trust compounds. Program officers eventually “know what you’re good at. And so they almost can sometimes, you know, you can read between the lines that this was maybe written with you in mind, because they know you could do a good job.”

The progression is predictable: phase one leads to phase two, then phase three, which can become “many millions of dollars over the course of several years.” It also creates confidence to invest in manufacturing.

Lesson 3: Defense Sales Requires a Pincer Movement

Programs of record—becoming the default procurement choice—represent real scale. “You are now the product that the military procures from,” Matthew explains. But getting there requires simultaneous attacks on two fronts.

First, you need specs-level understanding. Talk to the colonels making procurement decisions about power consumption, temperature ranges, and size constraints. Second, you need budget authority. “You need to lobby Congress” to ensure “budget items are appropriated to fund those purchases.”

Here’s the paradox Matthew identifies: “Those people who are making the decision can’t lobby on your behalf, nor can they tell Congress that they want to buy your stuff. You need to then get written into the bill, the funding to buy rubidium optical clocks, and then the purchaser will then make that purchase from you.”

This creates a coordination problem with no shortcuts. Matthew describes it as “unlike any go to market motion I’ve ever seen. It’s very strange. It’s convoluted, but it’s just the way it works.” His advice for founders looking to “hack” the system? “There’s not a lot of ways to hack it. You just have to play the game.”

Lesson 4: Lobbying Is Infrastructure, Not Influence

After spending time in DC meeting with legislators, Matthew hit a scaling constraint: “I’m only one person. I can only be there every so often.” The solution? Recognizing that “Washington is still very much a who, you know, place and having someone talking in the ears of the legislators and the staffers and lobbying on behalf of the industry and the specific company, it’s a valuable way to invest your money.”

This isn’t about corruption—it’s about persistent presence. Someone needs to be having daily conversations with staffers. The companies that win aren’t necessarily building better technology—they’re maintaining better relationships across power centers.

Lesson 5: Prime Integration as a Backdoor

The direct path to programs of record is long. The alternative? “We could try to just get in to become the timing aspect of that, which is a little bit of a lower lift,” Matthew notes. Becoming a component supplier to existing defense primes like Boeing or Lockheed reduces decision-makers you need to convince, though you still need to convince prime buyers to swap existing components.

Lesson 6: Frame National Security, Not Technical Specs

GPS spoofing attacks aren’t theoretical. Matthew references Wall Street Journal coverage of “airline pilots flying in what they know to be over Europe, but their GPS system is telling them they’re over Asia.” The military implication: “If there was ever, God forbid, a hot war with China, let’s say, over Taiwan, first shots fired would be to take out each other’s GPS. The side that could navigate and synchronize in a GPS denied environment would have a massive strategic advantage.”

This reframes Infleqtion’s clocks from “more accurate timing” to “strategic capability.” The broader lesson: defense buyers don’t purchase specifications—they purchase operational advantages in conflict scenarios.

Lesson 7: Deep Tech Fundraising Requires Evangelical Conviction

Having invested from both sides of the table, Matthew’s framework is probabilistic. “Probably a 15% chance you get lucky and you meet that investor where all the stars align,” but “most likely the 85% case, this is going to be a long process.”

Deep tech intensifies difficulty because “you need to find someone who believes in the version of the world that you’re trying to bring about, and you don’t necessarily have ARR or net dollar retention or gross churn numbers.”

The counterbalance? “There’s just so much money out there. There are so many people with capital who want to invest it, and it’s just you got to put the legwork in to find them.” The capital exists. Finding it is a volume problem disguised as selection.

For founders considering the defense market: expect the grind, but don’t get discouraged. The motion is learnable, the relationships are buildable, and the contracts, once won, can run on “autopilot for a long time.”