Dr Kurt Stokbro, born 1965, is an internationally recognized researcher and serial entrepreneur. He is currently director of Stokbro Invest and is managing a number of tech investments in clean energy, health and quantum technologies.
He is founder of QuantumWise A/S which in 2017 was acquired by Synopsys. He has previously held a professorship at Copenhagen University and positions at Technical University of Denmark, where he has coordinated a number of EU and Danish-funded R&D projects.
Dr. Stokbro has published more than 90 papers and review articles in international journals with +9500 citations and a h-index of 37. The scheme for ab initio calculations of quantum transport, developed by Dr. Stokbro and co-workers, has become the de facto standard for electron transport calculations and has laid the foundation for QuantumWise A/S and Atomistix A/S.
Business opportunities for materials science software
In 2002 my research group developed a new methodology for simulating electron transport in nanoscale systems [1] which today has become the de-facto standard for ab’initio modelling of electron transport. Instead of making the methodology freely available in an open source software package I decided to pursue a non-conventional avenue in the physics community and make it a commercial software product, what today is the QuantumATK package[2]. QuantumATK is today part of Synopsys and used by all the major semiconductor companies for developing next generation technology nodes and 35 full time employees are involved in the development, support and sales of the package. I will analyze how we could successfully enter the very competitive market for commercial atomic-scale modelling software and discuss some of the opportunities that exist today for new entrants.
