The oversubscribed, $10 million Series A funding round marks the first public investment by an enterprise Fortune 500 company in quantum networking infrastructure, according to startup Qunnect.
The funding, according to the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based startup, will go towards accelerating the company’s mission to revolutionize communications and networking and marks the first public investment by an enterprise Fortune 500 company in quantum networking infrastructure.
The Series A funding was led by Airbus Ventures in addition to Cisco Investments and early-stage venture capital fund Quantonation.
[Related: ‘Change Is Scary’: Overhaul Of ‘Best-In-Class’ Cisco Partner Program Triggers Channel Anxiety]
The oversubscribed funding move signals growing market confidence in quantum networking and Qunnect’s live deployments in New York and Berlin, Qunnect said.
The upstart’s offerings include its Carina product suite, which the company said supports real-world deployment of scalable data networks based on quantum physics. Qunnect is working with strategic industry partners to develop turnkey variants of its Carina product suite so it can demonstrate the next generation of real-world industry use cases of quantum networks, the company said.
Qunnect was founded in 2017 as a spin-off from Stony Brook University’s Quantum Information Science and Technology Laboratory.
Cisco, for its part, entered the quantum networking arena in May after launching a quantum chip and opening a quantum lab in Santa Monica, California, as the tech giant kicks off its strategy building the infrastructure for the quantum internet.
“Cisco Investments is proud to announce its participation in Qunnect’s recent fundraising round, helping to accelerate the commercialization of quantum networking solutions. This investment underscores a shared vision for advancing secure communications and revolutionizing the infrastructure that will underpin the quantum internet,” said Kay Min, senior director of Cisco Investments, in a blog post on backing Qunnect.
Quantum networking complements Cisco’s own work in IP networking, said Bill Gartner, general manager and senior vice president of Cisco’s Optical Systems and Optics business within its Infrastructure and Security Group.
“We are very excited to see emerging technologies, like Qunnect, that can be deployed over existing fiber infrastructure,” Gartner said in a statement.
Quantum networking refers to the use of photons or electrons to transmit data between digital devices. Rather than traditional data packets, quantum networks use the quantum properties of these particles to encode and securely transmit data across large distances.
