Our Story

Quantemol was founded in 2004 by Prof. Jonathan Tennyson and Dr Daniel Brown as a spin-out company from the University College London Physics and Astronomy department.

Both founders are involved in the company’s activities as they are part of the Board of Directors. Additionally, Jonathan serves as our Chief Scientist and Daniel as a Consultant with his expertise in scaling a business.

The main business idea for Quantemol was to develop a user-friendly interface which will help users to run calculations for electron scattering cross sections calculations using UKRmol codes. This suite of codes is a powerful ab initio tool to calculate cross sections however, it is notorious for complex inputs and outputs, which has meant a steep learning curve for new users. Usually, it took a whole PhD for a student to learn how to set up the calculation runs for one molecule correctly and to obtain and interpret results.

However, it was identified that narrowing down the inputs to the key settings and leaving other hundreds of parameters as the default allowed running of still high-quality calculations. Quantemol-N software was developed with that idea in mind and it reduced the set-up time to a 5-minute task.

Very soon the software became popular with academic users across different research fields, allowing them to supplement their experimental measurements with theoretical results as well as generate data for molecules where measurements were not possible.

Our milestones since then:

Quantemol-N was upgraded to Quantemol-EC, which uses a more recent UKRMol+ and offers extended capabilities such as automatic molecular symmetry detection. However, Quantemol-N and later Quantemol-EC are not just a wrapper for the UKRmol but an expert system which had other models like BEB and dissociative attachment estimator offering users the data they need to be calculated by various models.
Quantemol-VT expert system was launched aiming to create a user-friendly GUI for novel HPEM users and accelerate calculation set-up time as well as to offer results visualisation
By being attentive to our customers’ needs, Quantemol recognised that one of the stumbling blocks in the way of companies utilising more simulations is a lack of chemistry data or consistency in the data available. Quantemol then launched the Quantemol Database, which contains data needed for plasma modelling obtained from open sources

Through the years Quantemol have had many brilliant scientists on its team who contributed to the lasting legacy. We attended multiple international conferences, travelled across the globe (sometimes in the span of 2 weeks), met interesting people and made a lot of friends in different parts of the world. Our customer numbers are growing and there are many upcoming developments planned by the Quantemol team in 2023.

Quantemol is an international company in the sense that our markets and partnerships stretch across the east and west. We celebrate differences and love quirky characters who are as passionate about their job as we are.