Enabling the quantum internet - on fiber you already own.
A New York hardware company that distributes entangled photons through ordinary telecom fiber, at room temperature, in one of the noisiest cities on Earth.
Under the sidewalks of Brooklyn and Manhattan, a leased strand of telecom fiber is carrying something stranger than your phone call. Twenty thousand times a second, pairs of photons leave a building at the Brooklyn Navy Yard already linked - measure one, and you instantly know the other, even seventeen kilometers away at the carrier hotel on 60 Hudson Street. That link is quantum entanglement. The company sending it through pipes never designed for the job is Qunnect.
This is not a physics demo behind glass. Qunnect's GothamQ testbed has run for fifteen days straight at 99.84% uptime, through traffic, temperature swings, and the everyday vibration of a city that does not slow down for science. The company ships the boxes that make it work, and sells them to banks, telecoms, energy operators, and the defense world. Quantum networking, it turns out, has quietly become a product you can buy.
We build hardware to transform telecommunications infrastructure into scalable quantum networks.
For years the quantum internet was a beautiful idea kept in a freezer - literally. Most quantum hardware demands cryogenic cooling, vacuum chambers, and lab conditions you cannot replicate inside a city's utility ducts. You could entangle particles. You just could not get them out the door.
Entanglement is also fragile in a way ordinary signals are not. You cannot amplify a qubit the way you boost a fading phone signal - copying it destroys it. And the fiber already buried under cities is gloriously hostile to delicate quantum states: it twists, heats, shifts, and scrambles polarization as trucks rumble overhead. The theory was settled. The engineering, less so.
The hard part was never the physics. It was getting the physics to survive a Tuesday in Manhattan.
So the field faced a choice it rarely says out loud: rebuild the world's fiber for quantum, which no one will pay for, or build hardware tough enough to ride the fiber we already have. Qunnect bet on the second.
Qunnect spun out of the Quantum Information Technology group at Stony Brook University in 2017. The founding team - including Chief Science Officer Mehdi Namazi, Chief Technology Officer Mael Flament, and physicist Eden Figueroa - had built something the field had mostly written off as impractical: a quantum memory that worked at room temperature. No liquid helium. No vacuum. The kind of device you could imagine, one day, bolting into a real network.
In 2020 the company brought in Noel Goddard as CEO. Goddard is a biophysicist by training, with a PhD from Rockefeller, a postdoc at Harvard, a biotech startup behind him, and a stint as a seed investor. Not the resume you would script for a quantum hardware company - which may be exactly the point. The bet was less about inventing new physics than about industrializing physics that already worked, and turning a lab miracle into a catalog.
Founded on room-temperature quantum memory research from the university's Quantum Information Technology group.
A biophysicist and former founder takes the helm to turn lab science into shippable hardware.
Qunnect unveils an R&D facility and the GothamQ research hub at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, then extends the testbed into Manhattan.
15 continuous days at 99.84% uptime, distributing ~20,000 entangled photon pairs per second across deployed city fiber.
Oversubscribed round led by Airbus Ventures, with Cisco Investments and Quantonation. Air Force, Montana State, and New Mexico's ABQ-Net follow.
First metro-scale, high-speed entanglement swapping over commercial fiber - roughly 10,000x better than prior benchmarks.
Qunnect's answer to the plumbing problem is a product suite named Carina - a turn-key set of devices that work at room temperature and slot onto existing fiber. It is the backbone of the company's own GothamQ network, and it was the kit Deutsche Telekom's T-Labs chose for BearlinQ, its quantum network through Berlin. The pieces are deliberately modular, so a network can be assembled rather than invented from scratch each time.
Turn-key quantum networking devices for scalable, entanglement-based networks over commercial fiber.
Generates exceptionally pure polarization-entangled photon pairs - the raw material of the network.
A high-precision, multifrequency laser reference that keeps the hardware in tune.
Auto polarization compensator that corrects fiber noise in real time, so qubits survive the commute.
Most quantum hardware needs a freezer. Qunnect's needs an outlet.
The unglamorous hero of the lineup is QU-APC, the auto polarization compensator. City fiber constantly scrambles the polarization that encodes a qubit; the device watches and corrects it continuously, which is why a network can hold ~99% fidelity for days instead of minutes. It is not the part that makes headlines. It is the part that makes the headlines possible.
Quantum startups are not short on promises. Qunnect's case rests instead on a network that has been running, in public, in a difficult city, for a measurable amount of time.
The proof also shows up as customers and partners, which is rarer in this field than press releases suggest. Qunnect deployed two first-of-their-kind testbeds - GothamQ in New York and, with Deutsche Telekom's T-Labs, BearlinQ in Berlin. It demonstrated entanglement swapping over commercial fiber with Cisco. The U.S. Air Force selected it for defense work. Montana State University used Carina to stand up the first quantum entanglement network in the Northwestern U.S., and the company helped launch ABQ-Net, New Mexico's first quantum network.
A network that runs for fifteen days is a different kind of claim than a network that ran once.
Customers, the company says, span financial services, energy infrastructure, telecommunications, and defense and intelligence - sectors that share a quiet obsession with communications no one else can read.
Chose Carina for BearlinQ, achieving record entanglement distribution distances across Berlin.
Co-demonstrated metro-scale entanglement swapping; Cisco Investments backs the company.
Selected Qunnect to advance quantum networking for defense applications.
Co-launched New Mexico's first quantum network with Roadrunner Venture Studios.
The point of all this is not novelty. Entanglement-based networks promise communication that is secure by the laws of physics rather than the difficulty of math - tap the line and you change the state, and everyone knows. They also lay groundwork for distributed quantum computing, where machines too big for one room cooperate across a network, and for quantum sensing precise enough to matter in navigation, timing, and detection.
Qunnect's mission is narrower and, in its way, more stubborn: make the quantum internet something you install rather than something you propose. Hardware that ships. Devices that mount on fiber already in the ground. A network you can buy a piece of, plug in, and run past the weekend.
The quantum internet stops being a thought experiment the moment someone will sell you a box for it.
Return to that strand of fiber under the city. A few years ago it carried calls, video, and the ordinary internet, and the entangled photons running beside them would have sounded like science fiction with a marketing budget. Today they are a measured fact, logged at 99.84% uptime, swapped between nodes with a partner the size of Cisco, and watched closely by a branch of the armed forces.
What changed is not the fiber. It is that someone built hardware tough enough, and boring enough, to make entanglement survive a normal day in a real place. The quantum internet will not arrive as a single switch flipped on. It will arrive the way most infrastructure does - one deployed loop at a time, mostly underground, mostly unnoticed. Qunnect is betting it starts in New York, on the fiber that was already there.
The future of the internet may already be running under your feet. It just refuses to make a sound.