Ben Bloom
The founder of Atom Computing and the Colorado Technology Association's 2026 CEO of the Year, the first time the award has gone to a quantum computing founder.
Ben Bloom founded Atom Computing in 2018 in Boulder, Colorado, on a thesis that neutral atom qubits would prove the most scalable path to large-scale quantum computing. Under his leadership the company demonstrated a 1,225-site neutral atom array populated with 1,180 qubits in October 2023, the largest neutral atom quantum computer at that time, and established a strategic partnership with Microsoft.
Bloom's background traces directly to the JILA and NIST Boulder tradition of laser cooling and atom trapping. The same toolkit that produced the 2001 Nobel Prize for Bose-Einstein condensation underlies Atom Computing's commercial qubit architecture.
In 2026, Bloom won the Colorado Technology Association's CEO of the Year award, the first quantum computing founder to receive the recognition. The award reflects both Atom Computing's technical progress and the broader maturation of Colorado's quantum sector as a Colorado technology category in its own right.