Denise Ruffner brings more than a decade of experience building commercialization strategies for quantum industry leaders
NEW YORK CITY – July 16, 2026 – Haiqu, a leading developer of quantum application software, today announced that Denise Ruffner, a veteran quantum commercialization strategist, is joining the company as Vice President, Business Development and Commercial Operations Worldwide.
Ruffner was a pioneering executive at IBM Quantum where she developed the company’s Quantum Ambassador Program and Startup Program, which trained 350-plus global ambassadors to educate hundreds of customers annually on IBM’s quantum efforts. During her tenure, she also crafted the IBM worldwide sales strategy for IBM Systems.
Following her time at IBM, she served as the first Chief Business Officer at Cambridge Quantum Computing – now Quantinuum – where she played a key role in securing major enterprise customers including JPMorgan Chase. Ruffner also brought the first customers to both IonQ and Atom Computing, where she served as Vice President of Business Development and Chief Business Officer, respectively. She is currently a business advisor at Qilimanjaro.
“Since the inception of commercial quantum computing, I’ve had the privilege of helping bring many of our industry’s breakthrough technologies to market,” said Ruffner. “I believe the exceptional team at Haiqu has created something truly impactful. Haiqu’s Agentic Operating System is uniquely positioned to help scientists and enterprises accelerate their quantum research, and I’m excited to help expand its adoption around the world.”
Haiqu recently launched its Agentic OS, which combines agentic AI with Haiqu’s proprietary middleware stack. The OS is designed to guide users through use-case development and optimal approaches for running and iterating on experiments, enabling R&D teams to achieve usable results more efficiently with substantial reductions in time, cost and other resources.
“We believe that users should not have to wait for fully fault tolerant quantum computers to run meaningful experiments,” said Richard Givhan, CEO of Haiqu. “To this end, we have developed a semi-autonomous R&D system powered by intelligent agents that works with our proprietary middleware to enable a fundamentally faster path from proof of concept to advantage. Denise has been a long-time mentor for our team, and her expertise as one of the quantum industry’s most accomplished commercial leaders will be critical to helping us reach the right partners and end-users so that research teams do not have to wait until 2030 to achieve commercially useful results.”
Beyond her commercial successes, Ruffner has also advocated for inclusion and workforce development in the quantum industry. She founded Women in Quantum™, a global community of more than 10,000 members, and co-founded DiviQ (Diversity in Quantum), an organization supporting and educating a diverse quantum workforce to foster inclusivity in companies and universities.