Qunnect Raises $10M from Airbus, Cisco to advance quantum networking products and use cases

• Qunnect gets new funding from Airbus Ventures, Cisco Investments and Quantonation
• The company's Carina quantum product suite can run at room temperature
• Various verticals have adopted Qunnect's products

Qunnect, a company focused on creating quantum entanglement-based protocols over commercial fiber, has closed an oversubscribed Series A extended financing round of $10 million led by Airbus Ventures, with additional participation from Cisco Investments and Quantonation.

The company’s solutions, including its Carina product suite, support the deployment of data networks based on quantum physics. One of the company’s unique characteristics is that its commercially available hardware can operate at room temperature — rather than being limited to laboratory settings — allowing for widespread industry adoption.

Qunnect is collaborating with strategic industry partners to develop turnkey variants of its Carina product suite, enabling demonstrations of the next generation of real-world industry use cases for quantum networks across financial services, energy infrastructure, telecom, and defense sectors.

"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."

Qunnect is already seeing momentum with its Carina quantum network product set with customers in the financial services, telecommunications, energy infrastructure, and defense/intelligence sectors. Additionally, Qunnect's solutions were deployed in two quantum testbed networks—one in New York City and another in Berlin, in partnership with Deutsche Telekom's T-Labs.

One of the key elements Qunnect is touting is that the use of quantum physics as the foundation for the future network offers high levels of security, increased processing power, and enhanced sensing capabilities.

What’s also notable about this latest funding round is that Cisco joined as an investor through its corporate venture capital division, Cisco Investments. In May, Cisco Quantum Research announced its quantum network entanglement chip as part of its vision for a quantum data center. The vendor also formally opened Cisco Quantum Labs in Santa Monica, California, positioning itself as a key player in quantum networking infrastructure.

Airbus Ventures Partner Nicole Conner said that having “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."

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