QUANTUM NETWORKING STARTUP QUNNECT GAINS CISCO BACKING

Qunnect, a Brooklyn-based quantum networking company, has secured a $10 million extension to its Series A funding round, with Cisco Investments joining as a new backer.

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The round, led by Airbus Ventures and joined by Quantonation, fuels Qunnect's mission to build scalable quantum networks using existing telecom fiber. The investment will support product development, manufacturing, and real-world deployments for industries like finance, telecom, and defense.

The funding follows Qunnect's success in deploying quantum networks in New York City and Berlin, showing its tech can work over commercial fiber at room temperature. Unlike most quantum systems that need extreme cooling, Qunnect's Carina product suite—featuring entanglement sources, repeaters, and quantum memory—operates in standard server racks, making it practical for widespread use.

The Cisco partnership, sparked by Qunnect's proven testbeds, aims to turn these demos into customer-ready solutions within two years.

Cisco's involvement signals growing industry confidence in quantum networking. As a networking giant, Cisco sees Qunnect's technology as a way to bolster secure communications and lay the groundwork for a quantum internet.

The investment aligns with Cisco's own quantum efforts, including a new entanglement chip and a quantum lab in Santa Monica, California, focused on building infrastructure for future data centers.

BREAKTHROUGHS IN QUANTUM COMMUNICATION

Qunnect’s technology hinges on quantum entanglement, where paired photons share a special link, letting one reveal information about the other instantly, no matter the distance. This allows secure communication protocols, like quantum key distribution, that detect eavesdropping by disrupting the entanglement.