Mesa Quantum – an innovative quantum sensing company – announced an oversubscribed seed funding of $3.7 million led by J2 Ventures, a Boston-based fund focused on dual-use technologies, with participation from SOSV.
This funding enables Mesa Quantum to build a new research and development facility, hire top technical talent, and position themselves to commercialize chip-scale quantum sensors for deployment at scale. And the technology has applications in defense, climate, energy, space, telecommunications, and several other key economic areas.
Mesa Quantum is essentially miniaturizing and commercializing chip-scale quantum sensors.
Satellite dependence for everything from defense to commercial use cases remains a large and underserved market. Even though the Space Force and other government agencies depend on Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites for Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT), and so do most consumer electronics. But GPS is vulnerable to jamming and spoofing attacks, which opens the door to bad outcomes like power grid and telecommunication disruption, failure of military operations in the field, and disruptions to supply chain and transportation networks.
Mesa Quantum was awarded an additional Space Force grant of $1.9 million for Alternative PNT(Alt PNT) applications, with several other awards they anticipate in short order as a part of their government scaling. And Mesa Quantum’s technology will result in more resilient, precise, and scalable methods for maintaining synchronization, determining position, and conducting measurements. Using chip-scale quantum sensors for alternative PNT will be indispensable in GPS-denied environments such as military-contested zones, underground, underwater, and in space.
KEY QUOTES:
“Given the rise in our everyday technology’s reliance on GPS, it has developed into a single point of failure for our economy. Heightened geopolitical tensions have forced the U.S. government to seek alternative solutions to maintain our national security. Current generations of quantum sensors, such as atomic clocks, are not a viable alternative because of their size, weight, power consumption (SWaP), cost, and lack of at-scale manufacturability – all limitations Mesa Quantum is focused on overcoming.”
– Sristy Agrawal, CEO & Co-founder of Mesa Quantum
“We have been focused on making an investment in this space for years, and Mesa Quantum is singular in its ability to produce leading-edge technology while servicing the massive commercial needs of what they are producing.”
– Dr. Jon Bronson, Managing Partner at J2 Ventures
“Our vision is to integrate chip-scale quantum sensors into everyday technologies, ranging from autonomous vehicles in the air, on the ground, and at sea, all the way to the smartphones we use daily.”
– Dr. Wale Lawal, CTO and Co-founder of Mesa Quantum
