Company

Company

Potomac is a quantum computing company focused on cryptanalysis. We are bringing together quantum researchers, AI engineers, and systems specialists to build the software required for practical cryptographic workloads. The company builds on work by the MultiVM Labs team and is recruiting across research, engineering, and safety.

Origins

Built on prior work

Potomac is a new quantum cryptanalysis company building on work by the MultiVM Labs team.

Members of the team studied the quantum arithmetic relevant to elliptic-curve cryptography and contributed to ECDSA.Fail, an open study of AI-assisted optimization of point-addition circuits for Shor’s algorithm, under their MultiVM Labs affiliation. Since the paper, the research team has continued to contribute to the public benchmark, including the accepted submission of 8 September 2026. Potomac takes that starting point and builds the company that can carry it to hardware.

The ECDSA.Fail work

What we build

How the functions fit together

Four functions make up the company. Each depends on the others: an algorithm matters when it compiles and executes, an experiment matters when its evidence is recorded and comparable, and a capability matters when it is governed.

Quantum research: Elliptic-curve arithmetic, cryptanalytic algorithms, verification, fault tolerance, and resource estimation.
Execution and infrastructure: Compilation, mapping and scheduling, hardware integration, experiments on external systems, and the computing foundation for all of it.
AI research systems: Frontier models proposing and implementing candidates inside a workflow of evaluators, baselines, and recorded experiments.
Safety: Research authorization, coordinated disclosure, recovery-and-return governance, and independent review, developed before operations.

The company thesis

Team

Leadership

Potomac is led by its founders across company building, engineering, and cryptography research. Heads of Quantum Cryptanalysis and of Hardware Integration are among the active openings.

Ivan Miskovic

CEO & Co-Founder

Ivan leads Potomac as chief executive: company building, strategy, capital, and the relationships with quantum hardware and software providers that the company depends on. He was previously an executive at Spin Labs and worked as a venture-capital operator, and he hosts research conversations with quantum scientists on Quantum FDN. His responsibility is to turn a research thesis into a company that can do careful, consequential work: recruiting scientific leadership, securing compute and collaboration agreements, and making sure the recovery-and-return mission develops its governance before it develops operations.

Ross Nkama

CTO

Ross leads engineering and AI research systems at Potomac. He previously worked at Google and Meta AI, with distributed-systems expertise across large-scale infrastructure. In September 2026 the ECDSA.Fail challenge organizers accepted his submission of a reversible point-addition circuit that reduced the average executed Toffoli count at unchanged qubit width; the work used parallel research agents, explicit evaluators, and a fresh-clone rerun of the official harness. At Potomac he is building the research infrastructure that connects models, evaluators, and compute so that experiments are reproducible and their failures are recorded.

Manuel B. Santos

Lead Cryptography Researcher

Manuel leads cryptography research at Potomac. He holds a Ph.D. in Quantum Cryptography from Técnico, University of Lisbon, and an MSc in Applied Mathematics from Imperial College London, and previously worked at Nillion, Tectonic Labs, and Tekever. He is a coauthor of ECDSA.Fail, the open study of AI-assisted optimization of elliptic-curve point-addition circuits, contributed under his MultiVM Labs affiliation. At Potomac he defines the cryptanalytic workloads, correctness criteria, and resource accounting against which the company’s algorithms and software are judged.

Careers

Fifteen active openings

Potomac is recruiting researchers and engineers across quantum research, execution and infrastructure, AI, and safety: from Head of Quantum Cryptanalysis to Research Evaluation Engineer and Cryptographic Safety and Recovery Governance Lead. Each role has a shareable page with its purpose, responsibilities, relevant experience, and how to apply.

Quantum research
Execution and infrastructure
AI
Safety

All open roles

Investors

For investors

Potomac is building a company around a consequential problem with dated public evidence of its research capability. Ivan Miskovic handles investor conversations directly. The company thesis, market context, and the evidence the company intends to produce next are on the Objective page.

Contact Ivan Miskovic about investing

miskovic@potomac.net