Richard Murray

Richard Murray co-founded ORCA Computing in 2019 as a spinout from the University of Oxford and has led it as chief executive since. He holds a PhD in quantum atom-optics and spent more than 15 years running scientific teams on early-stage technologies, including quantum, AR/VR and industrial uses of photonics. His earlier work included support for the UK government’s £270m quantum technologies program.

Quantum that fits the rack

ORCA builds photonic quantum computers, which use particles of light rather than supercooled circuits. Its PT Series systems are designed to sit in conventional data centers. By early 2025 it had delivered 10 on-premises systems to customers including the UK Ministry of Defence, the National Quantum Computing Centre, Poland’s Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center and Montana State University, according to the company.

In June 2026 ORCA joined Digital Realty’s Innovation Lab in London, where its PT Series systems run in a live data center alongside AI and high-performance computing (HPC) hardware without specialized cooling. “ORCA was built around the idea that quantum computing should integrate directly into the infrastructure enterprises already rely on for AI and high-performance computing,” Murray said, as reported by The Quantum Insider.

Pairing quantum with GPUs and AI

Much of ORCA’s work in 2026 has tied quantum to the classical computing that buyers already own. In March it released a GPU-accelerated simulator for photonic circuits built on NVIDIA’s cuQuantum library and said it plans to open-source it alongside a future NVIDIA CUDA-Q release. In May it partnered with SiC Systems to apply hybrid quantum-classical computing and agentic AI to chemical and biomanufacturing process design.

ORCA also leads the £11.6m Quantum Data Centre of the Future project funded by Innovate UK, a 14-member consortium including BT, Riverlane, PQShield and NCC Group that is working out how quantum and classical systems can run side by side. Under Murray the company has grown to about 65 staff, with offices in London, Toronto and Austin, Texas, where it set up a US headquarters after buying the integrated photonics division of GXC in 2024.

Why it matters to UK technology buyers

For UK organizations that run their own infrastructure or buy colocation, ORCA’s approach changes the question. It is no longer whether to build a specialist quantum facility, but whether a quantum system can share a hall with existing servers and GPUs. Its customer list is weighted toward government, defense and research, and the Digital Realty deployment gives data center operators and their enterprise tenants a working example to assess.

Murray has built ORCA around a commercial bet rather than a physics milestone: that quantum will arrive through the data center door, and that the supplier already sitting next to the GPUs will be best placed when it does.