Qunnect has announces closing an oversubscribed Series A extended financing round of $10M led by Airbus Ventures, with additional participation from Cisco Investments and Quantonation, accelerating the company’s mission to revolutionize communications and networking.
Qunnect products, including its Carina product suite, support real-world deployment of scalable data networks based on quantum physics. These quantum networks hold the solution to a truly secure, exponentially more powerful network of computing power than currently leveraged today. Qunnect’s commercially available hardware are uniquely designed to operate at room temperature – rather than being limited to laboratory settings – allowing for wide-spread adoption by industry.
Qunnect is 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.
“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,” said Noel Goddard, CEO of Qunnect. “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.”
Cisco joined the list of Qunnect investors this round through their corporate venture capital arm, Cisco Investments. Last month, Cisco Quantum Research announced their quantum network entanglement chip as part of their quantum data center vision and formally opened Cisco Quantum Labs in Santa Monica, California, positioning themselves as a key player in quantum networking infrastructure.
“Cisco is advancing the quantum technologies that will secure and define the quantum internet and data centers of the future,” said Aleem Rizvon, vice president, Cisco Investments. “Qunnect is placing quantum networking technologies into the hands of innovators today, poised to revolutionize security and communications.”
Since closing its initial Series A round, Qunnect has delivered its groundbreaking Carina quantum networking product suite to market with customers in the financial services, telecommunications, energy infrastructure, and defense/intelligence sectors. In addition, 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.
Advantages in 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. 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.
“Qunnect has successfully delivered on the foundational promise of quantum communication,” remarks Airbus Ventures Partner Nicole Conner. “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.”
“From day one, our mission was to invent and develop hardware that will become the infrastructure for the future quantum internet.” Said Mehdi Namazi, Chief Scientist and co-founder of Qunnect. “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.”
