Former Green Berets bet quantum radar can deceive US adversaries

A pair of business partners who served together in the U.S. Army Green Berets are moving their families from the East Coast to New Mexico to develop quantum radar and sensing technology that U.S. forces and allies can use in conflict zones where enemies jam GPS satellite signals.

Stephen Buchanan, founder and CEO of Bandelier Technologies, said he would not have made the decision to move his wife and two children — another is on the way — to the Land of Enchantment had it not been for the New Mexico Lab Embedded Entrepreneur Program.

Buchanan must finish his MBA at Harvard before he moves. Asked whether his goal is to sell or own the company, Buchanan replied, “We want to build out this big company to manufacture systems in New Mexico, create a ton of New Mexico jobs.”

“And that’s not like the easy route, but my wife has accused me of never choosing the easy route for anything,” he added.

LEEP provides entrepreneurs such as Buchanan a two-year program where they can commercialize technology developed in the national labs. Buchanan will be given a stipend, health insurance and the chance to work with some of the world’s best scientists to bring his company’s technology — essentially an alternative to GPS using quantum — to market.

CerraCap Impact Ventures Capital, a California venture capital firm that has invested in New Mexico companies, announced in late February it had invested in Bandelier. “We found this kind of gem along with the help from Los Alamos National Labs, the NM LEEP program,” Abhi Mukherjee, partner at CerraCap, said in an interview.

Mukherjee is an advisor to Los Alamos’ LEEP program, which is now in its fifth year. The New Mexico State Investment Council committed an investment of up to $10 million into CerraCap in October 2021.

“I’m always on the lookout for the next best innovations,” said Mukherjee. The LEEP program opens doors for investors such as himself to make deals with companies that “would really kind of change the face of national security and humanity for years to come.”

Josh Heebner — who earned an MBA from Duke University and served with Buchanan in the 5th Special Forces Group — is Bandelier Technology’s head of growth. He will lead Bandelier’s commercialization strategy.

The business partners completed multiple combat deployments together. Buchanan in an interview recalled one to Syria in 2022-2023.

“In my last deployment to Syria, they kept crashing the drones in front of the base,” he said of U.S. and allied drones. “At first we were like, ‘Why can’t you guys do your jobs right? And then it happened again and we were like, ‘There’s something going on here.’ And the GPS was getting jammed.”

He added: “If you look at the Ukrainian campaign, they’ve almost had to discard GPS altogether ... It’s jammed, it’s spoofed, it’s unavailable to them.”

After his deployments, Buchanan enrolled at Harvard. Another veteran, Wale Lawal, the CEO of Mesa Quantum and a Harvard Business School graduate, spoke to one of Buchanan’s classes about the possibilities of quantum technology.

“It just really spiked my curiosity” because it was “so different from what everybody else was doing,” said Buchanan.

He approached Lawal after the class, who told Buchanan about opportunities to start a company in New Mexico. Eventually, that led Buchanan to apply for the LEEP program.

Sponsors and partners of the program include Los Alamos National Laboratory, the U.S. Economic Development Program, the Los Alamos Commerce and Development Corporation, the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer. Dr. Diego Dalvit, a senior theoretical physicist with Los Alamos, is working with Bandeir to develop the technology.

Buchanan said that while the company will focus on defense applications for the technology, they are also looking at networking and communications applications that can be used for nondefense purposes.

“We always have to stay ahead, we have to have the communications resiliency, where anything our adversary throws at us, we’re one step ahead of them,” Buchanan said. “ … The time is now for quantum communications sensing and networking where those applications are coming into the primetime limelight.”

Justin Horwath covers tech and energy for the Journal. You can reach him at jhorwath@abqjournal.com.