QCi splits its C-suite in two, hiring a $2B sales veteran as CRO while promoting its former CRO to a new CPO role

Quantum Computing Inc. restructured its senior leadership on July 22, naming Susan Hunt as its new Chief Revenue Officer and elevating former CRO Pouya Dianat into a newly created Chief Product Officer role. The move, announced via PR Newswire, reflects a deliberate split: one executive owns the pipeline, the other owns the product, and QCi's CEO Yuping Huang wants both functions running in parallel as the company pushes its photonics and quantum portfolio into broader commercial deployment.

A $2B sales track record comes to quantum

Hunt arrives with credentials that are rare in a sector still dominated by research-stage companies. According to QCi's announcement, she has negotiated more than $2 billion in enterprise agreements over a career spanning Salesforce, Nuance Communications, LivePerson, Orbital Insight, and Sprint PCS. Each of those stints put her in front of large enterprise buyers at a moment when the underlying technology was still being proven out, a pattern that maps closely onto QCi's current position.

Her mandate at QCi is broad: global revenue strategy, direct sales, business development, strategic partnerships, and customer success all report through her. For enterprise procurement and operations teams evaluating quantum or photonics solutions, that consolidated ownership typically means a single point of accountability for contract structure and post-sale support.

Hunt's prior roles are notable for their breadth across verticals. Nuance brought her deep into healthcare and financial services AI; Orbital Insight placed her in geospatial analytics for government and commercial clients; Salesforce gave her experience with large-scale SaaS sales motions. That mix matters for QCi, whose own target markets span high-performance computing, cybersecurity, aerospace and defense, and AI infrastructure.

Dianat's shift from revenue to product strategy

Dianat's transition from CRO to CPO is as telling as Hunt's hire. Rather than departing, he moves into a role that QCi created specifically to formalize product leadership at an organizational level it did not previously have. As CPO, he will own the product vision, roadmap, and management process, working across engineering, technology, and marketing teams to translate QCi's technical portfolio into commercial offerings.

The logic is straightforward. Dianat accumulated direct exposure to customer requirements and QCi's technical depth during his CRO tenure. That combination is exactly what a product function needs to sequence a roadmap that closes the gap between what the technology can do and what enterprise buyers will actually purchase. Creating a dedicated CPO role rather than absorbing those responsibilities into engineering or the CEO office suggests QCi is treating product management as a core commercial function, not an afterthought.

The structure that emerges places Hunt and Dianat as parallel executives under Huang, each accountable for a distinct growth lever. Demand generation and contract execution sit with Hunt; product-market fit and solution development sit with Dianat. That kind of explicit separation is common at SaaS companies scaling past early adopters but less common in the quantum hardware space, where most companies are still organized around the lab.

Room-temperature deployment as the commercial wedge

QCi's underlying value proposition for enterprise buyers is its room-temperature, low-power operating requirement. Most quantum computing systems require near-absolute-zero cooling, which makes them expensive to operate and nearly impossible to deploy outside a controlled facility. QCi's photonics-based approach sidesteps that constraint, according to the company's own product descriptions. For a VP of Operations or a defense procurement officer evaluating where quantum-class computation is practical today, that distinction is operationally significant.

The company is vertically integrated across photonic chips, semiconductor manufacturing, and full-stack quantum systems. It also provides foundry services for photonic chip production, which opens a B2B revenue stream independent of end-system sales. QCi has facilities across Arizona, California, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Virginia, in addition to its Hoboken, New Jersey headquarters. That geographic footprint supports both manufacturing scale and proximity to government customers in the mid-Atlantic corridor.

What this means for your team

• Enterprise buyers evaluating quantum or photonics platforms should request a structured product roadmap conversation with Dianat's team to understand how QCi's CPO function will sequence solutions against your operational requirements.
• Procurement teams negotiating with QCi should note that Hunt's organization now carries full authority over partnership and customer success terms, so escalation paths and SLA discussions run through the CRO office.
• Defense and aerospace program managers should track QCi's government-facing pipeline under the new leadership structure, as the CPO role is explicitly scoped to address both commercial and government customer needs.
• Operations and IT leaders assessing quantum-adjacent infrastructure should test QCi's room-temperature deployment claim against their own facility constraints, that specification, if it holds at production scale, removes one of the primary barriers to enterprise adoption.