Cisco Investments participated in a new funding round for New York-based quantum networking firm Qunnect that is looking to revolutionize current networking environments toward eventually supporting quantum computing and also further fuels Cisco’s broader interest in the quantum space.

Qunnect’s latest investment is a $10 million Series A that was led by initial investor Airbus Ventures, with additional financial support from Cisco Investments and Quantonation. Qunnect CEO Noel Goddard explained in an interview with SDxCentral that this latest round was “basically an extension round” to its initial Airbus Venture funding from 2022, “after everyone noted the success that we've had on these test beds in both New York and Berlin.”

Those test beds use Qunnect’s focus on quantum networking, with a core focus from quantum memory that adds timing to network transport. “Quantum memory basically adds timing to the network because they can catch and release photons in transit,” Goddard explained.

Qunnect put this focus toward a technical platform that did not require extreme cooling or a vacuum and would allow for this quantum networking approach to be installed into an already established networking deployment. This involves using Qunnect’s technology based in its Carina product suite.

“Basically [it] allows you to create entanglement, distribute it, preserve it, and validate it so that you can have entanglement-based protocols over standard telecom fiber,” Goddard said. “That's the basis of all types of quantum networking, both the near-term solution, which again plays toward the ability to enhance the security of digital networks today with quantum, and the longer-term vision, which is to build a quantum Internet where you can connect quantum devices at scale, like connecting quantum computers.”

Qunnect’s first test bed ran on a deployed fiber ring underneath parts of Brooklyn and Queens in New York. Qunnect went into that first test with some trepidation.

Goddard explained that there had been demonstrations of single photon networking transmissions and studies done that showed such networking could be done over commercial fiber. “But single photons are a lot easier than entangled photons because you need to be able to preserve entanglement, and that means you have to preserve the fidelity from the time that you feed into the fiber to the endpoint,” Goddard added.

“We honestly did not know it was going to work because there was no reason to believe that the fibers that run through New York City that were laid not for quantum, were going to host quantum the way we hoped it was,” Goddard said. “And a year later, we were basically breaking all of the records that anybody thought were ever possible.”

That work then led to a test earlier this year with German telecom giant Deutsche Telekom in Berlin. That test transmitted entangled photons over a 30-kilometer-long fiber-optic network that able to automatically compensate to changing network conditions while maintaining 99 percent fidelity over a 17-day test period.

Cisco’s quantum interest

That success drew the financial interest of Cisco.

"Qunnect’s approach fits right into our broader quantum networking strategy,” Vijoy Pandey, GM and SVP of Outshift, noted in a blog post tied to the new investment. “We're not just building one-off research prototypes – we're creating the infrastructure for a real quantum Internet. Qunnect has been collaborating with us for some time now, customizing their solutions based on our vision. It's collaborations like this that move us from interesting research to deployable quantum networking solutions."

Cisco’s investment participation follows on the heels of the networking giant’s announcement last month that it has developed a prototype quantum network entanglement chip to help scale quantum networks and connect quantum processors. That chip was developed through Cisco’s Outshift incubator and in collaboration with the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Cisco said the chip operates at standard telecom wavelengths, meaning it can leverage existing fiber optic infrastructure, consumes less than 1 milliwatt of power, and offers one million high-fidelity entanglement pairs per output channel, with a rate of up to 200 million entanglement pairs per second in chip. It also functions at room temperature as a miniaturized photonic integrated chip (PIC) and can therefore be deployed in existing systems.

Goddard added that the Cisco investment further validates Qunnect’s quantum networking focus and work with Cisco in furthering those quantum goals.

“[Cisco’s] like the major global player in enterprise networking, and as their business is basically data centers they're right now recognizing, and have had quite a bit of press out at the beginning of the year, that the next step will be quantum data centers and it's important to develop that architecture today, which Qunnect today is basically a core partner to Cisco,” Goddard said. “Doing that and their investment signals their interest in working as they move toward their own goals and their quantum strategy.”