Qunnect, a company deploying quantum entanglement-based protocols over commercial fiber, announced the closing of an oversubscribed Series A extended financing round of $10 million, led by Airbus Ventures, with additional participation from Cisco Investments and Quantonation. This funding accelerates the company’s mission to transform the way communications and networking are done.
Qunnect products (including the Carina product suite) support real-world deployment of scalable data networks based on quantum physics. And these quantum networks hold the solution to a truly secure, exponentially more powerful network of computing power than is currently leveraged today. Qunnect’s commercially available hardware is uniquely designed to operate at room temperature, rather than being limited to laboratory settings, enabling widespread adoption by industry.
Qunnect is also working with strategic industry partners to develop turnkey variants of its Carina product suite to enable demonstrations of the next generation of real-world industry use cases of quantum networks.
Cisco also joined the list of Qunnect investors this round through their corporate venture capital arm, Cisco Investments. Last month, Cisco Quantum Research announced its quantum network entanglement chip as part of its quantum data center vision. And it formally opened Cisco Quantum Labs in Santa Monica, California, positioning itself as a key player in quantum networking infrastructure.
Since the closing of the initial Series A round, Qunnect has delivered its Carina quantum networking product suite to market with customers in the financial services, telecommunications, energy infrastructure, and defense/intelligence sectors. And Qunnect’s solutions were deployed in two, first-of-their-kind, quantum testbed networks—one in New York City and another in Berlin in partnership with Deutsche Telekom’s T-Labs.
The advantages of utilizing quantum physics as the foundation for the future network lie in the high level of security it offers, higher processing power, and enhanced sensing capabilities. And Qunnect’s Carina product suite creates, buffers, and preserves high-quality entangled photons, the basis for quantum communications–at unprecedented rates, enabling breakthroughs in cybersecurity and distributed quantum computing and sensing.
KEY QUOTES:
“This new round of investment was driven by the response we received from industry following the performance of Qunnect products deployed on city-scale quantum networking testbeds. Because our quantum networking products have a standard server rack form factor and are designed to operate at room temperature, we are seeing customers innovate with our Carina product suite on existing telecommunications fiber, paving the way for further breakthroughs in security, sensing, and information transmission.”
Noel Goddard, CEO of Qunnect
“Cisco is advancing the quantum technologies that will secure and define the quantum internet and data centers of the future. Qunnect is placing quantum networking technologies into the hands of innovators today, poised to revolutionize security and communications.”
Aleem Rizvon, vice president, Cisco Investments
“Qunnect has successfully delivered on the foundational promise of quantum communication. We are thrilled to have Cisco Investments join alongside us, gaining their invaluable expertise as we support Qunnect’s acceleration of next-generation hardware tools that enable secure and reliable communication built on quantum entanglement communication protocols.”
Airbus Ventures Partner Nicole Conner
“From day one, our mission was to invent and develop hardware that will become the infrastructure for the future quantum internet. Now, after proving our unparallel quantum network capabilities in New York and Berlin, and thanks to partners like Cisco, we are pushing the industry towards the era of quantum network utility.”
Mehdi Namazi, Chief Scientist and co-founder of Qunnect
