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How Infleqtion Cracked the Defense Tech Go-to-Market Playbook for Quantum Technology

The path from investor to operator isn’t typically planned. But when Matthew Kinsella, CEO of Infleqtion, saw the quantum opportunity in 2017, he made a calculated bet that would eventually pull him across the table. What started as seed funding for a university spinout became an $11 million government contract and a masterclass in navigating one of tech’s most complex sales motions: selling deep tech to the Department of Defense.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Matthew walked through Infleqtion’s evolution from research lab to commercial quantum company, revealing the specific tactics that transformed Nobel Prize-winning physics into deployable defense technology.

The Technical Advantage That Enabled GTM

Infleqtion’s roots trace back to Cu Boulder, where Dana Anderson pioneered neutral atoms quantum technology. Unlike competing approaches requiring massive cryogenic freezers, Anderson’s technology “froze atoms by shooting them with lasers,” Matthew explains. The atoms become “the coldest place in the known universe based upon how much they’re not moving. But the glass cell that they live in, the ultra high vacuum cell they live in, is at room temperature.”

This unlocked deployability. While competitors built systems confined to data centers, Infleqtion could build products that “can be field deployed, they can be ruggedized, and most importantly, they can be cost down and shrunk.”

The company’s first commercial product, Ticker, is an optical quantum clock that “keeps time a thousand times more accurately than anything else out there in the market.”

The Three Paths to Defense Revenue

Matthew’s candor about learning defense sales is refreshing. “I will answer that question as best I can, but I would want to call it to your audience. If anybody has any good tips, please send them my way also, because it is a very different go to market motion than anything I have experienced before.”

Path One: The SBIR Conveyor Belt

“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 range from $100,000 to $2 million on “time and materials plus like a 10% fee.”

But SBIRs serve a purpose beyond funding. “The most important thing about it, honestly, is that you’re building the relationship with those buyers of the technology.” Ticker started as a DARPA SBIR. Winning that contract validated demand and gave Infleqtion confidence to “actually invest in the resources to build the manufacturing capabilities to sell that.”

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 builds trust with program officers who “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.”

Path Two: Programs of Record

The real scale comes from becoming the default procurement choice. A program of record means “you are now the product that the military procures from,” Matthew explains. “Let’s say we want a program of record with the Navy. We could be now the clock that the Navy buys instead of some other clock.”

Getting there requires what Matthew calls “a multi pronged sort of pincer movement.” You need to understand specs at the operational level—talking to colonels about power consumption and temperature ranges. Simultaneously, you must “lobby Congress” to ensure “budget items are appropriated to fund those purchases.”

This creates a paradox: “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.”

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? “There’s not a lot of ways to hack it. You just have to play the game.”

Path Three: Prime Integration

The potential shortcut involves becoming a component supplier to existing defense primes. “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. But even this requires convincing prime buyers to swap out existing components.

The Lobbying Investment

After spending time in DC meeting with legislators, Matthew recognizes the limitation: “I’m only one person. I can only be there every so often.” His conclusion: “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.”

Why This Matters Now

GPS spoofing attacks are accelerating. 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 concern is existential: “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.”

Having timing accuracy “locally makes you not susceptible to a GPS denied environment in which you can actually have that concept of time at that level of accuracy without having to access the GPS system.”

The Deep Tech Fundraising Reality

Having sat on both sides of the table, Matthew’s advice cuts through noise. “For every one of those” Sam Altman stories, “there’s 100 that are out pounding pavement, shaking hands, kissing babies for months and months.”

His framework is probabilistic: “Probably a 15% chance you get lucky,” but “most likely the 85% case, this is going to be a long process.” Deep tech intensifies this because “you need to find someone who believes in the version of the world that you’re trying to bring about.”

The counterbalance? “There’s just so much money out there. There are so many people with capital who want to invest it.”

Infleqtion’s journey illuminates a repeatable pattern: start with SBIRs to build relationships, invest in manufacturing to scale, work the pincer movement between Pentagon and Congress, and play the long game toward programs of record.