The Quantum Internet: Qunnect’s Vision for the Future of Communication
- Hello everyone. We are here today with Qunnect, part of SandboxAQ Strategic Investment program and we are gonna try to discover a little bit more about what does this company do in the quantum network ecosystem. Noel, Mehdi please. I would love you guys to introduce yourself. - Hi Fernando. Thanks so much for asking us
to be on this recording. I'm Noel Goddard, the CEO of Qunnect. We are a quantum networking company that's located in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We like to specifically say quantum networking because that applies to lots of different applications beyond what some people sort of pigeonhole us towards, which is secure communications. And we've spent the last few years developing a product suite which supports entanglement distribution over standard telecom fiber.
So we like to think of ourselves as an infrastructure company. I've been with the company since the beginning of 2020, just before the pandemic. I met Mehdi and his, his co-founder, Mael Flament as when they were both graduate students start transitioning out and starting their own company. And since that time, we've, we've basically commercialized six new products that were never on the market and we're starting to explore the application space and, and market space now. - And I'm Mehdi, I'm the co-founder and currently the chief scientist at Qunnect. As Noel said, this all started from the graduate lab where I was doing my PhD at.
My passion was always with quantum, but very soon, it evolved into this idea that how much we can actually use quantum in our real world in real life and benefit from it. So a lot of the things that we did during the PhD, but then it expanded a lot at Qunnect was towards this idea of building devices that work on a quantum level, but they actually can be put in a box and deployed everywhere in a city or across the country to be used for quantum communication. - Thank you so much and thank you for taking the time today to explain a little bit more of what you guys do. I keep on hearing the same thing across the industry and outside of the industry from the investors community or the technical community at quantum conferences, or not quantum conferences, it's, Qunnect is about the team, the, the excellence, the technical excellence of the team that they have and what they building is very unique. What, what makes it so unique? - Sure, sure. I am very proud of our team.
Our, our team is very strong. I think one of the things that made us very different and strong, and I say this in the nicest way because the other option is also very good, is that we didn't come from like a very big legacy lab or a university or something and everyone who joined here, because I came, I was the first graduate student PhD student who graduated from, from my parent lab, from a state university in, in New York, in New York state. And everyone who joined us, we were all eager to try different things with each other and build different technologies with each other versus a lot of different companies that the technology was built over like decades of the par parent lab research.
They definitely have a lot of advantages of course years of research and development already in the parent lab. But we benefited from this fact that we could try a lot of things and bumble around together and like invent different technologies and always listen to each other and invent together rather than being like, no, we want it this way or that way the way that we used to do. And it resulted into everyone working so coherently together to build this product, sort of the very different hardwares that we have.
A bunch of them I personally couldn't even think of like four or five years ago when we started this. So if it wasn't because of this team, we would never be here to have all this diversity of technology that we have today. - Yeah, I think there's not a lot to add, but one of the things that's always excited me about the Qunnect team in general is that everybody comes to work enthusiastic and ready to attack problems without boundaries.
So I've always been somebody who loves the idea of interdisciplinary research and I like the idea of problem solving where you literally, it's like a blank page and you need to go out and you need to gather expertise in, in various areas in order to build the best thing. And our team has been great about the fact that they're very fluid across what would normally be boundaries in a larger company and because of that they're inventing things which have never existed in the world before. So seeing that creative energy come together is really exciting. It's wonderful whenever we hit like a deadline that everybody has been really pushing to see and every time we end up launching a product, the most recent of which was this summer when we launched our full rack system, it's an incredibly celebratory time for the entire team to see something.
It's, it's a creative process, right? Come together and now be a new thing in the world. - Correct. It's months or years of work coming together to be able to bring it out. And a lot of challenges, especially in the hard work world and the supply chain globalization where we live in. Tell us a bit, a little bit more about that latest product that you launch can, how can you, how will you explain it to a non-quantum executive, an executive that is not familiar with quantum technologies or that is not working in this kind of hardware domain? - So I think the, the right way to think about what Qunnect does is that we build infrastructure.
We take for granted that all of us that are talking on this interview right now are talking over a streaming technology online. But the number of devices which support that data transfer have been, you know, decades in the making. And the digital internet is something which we know basically opened all of these possibilities but was not envisioned when things started in the late sixties and the early seventies that was, it was literally just can we send data from one computer to the next in a way that we could start doing academic sharing? And then it evolved in eventually to something that was the worldwide web. And then after that, eventually to what we we see now is streaming technologies. And since the pandemic that's also just ramped up exponentially. So I think it's very hard to envision today when people talk about the quantum analogy, which they would call the quantum internet.
What does it mean to have, you know, the, all of the applications which might be enabled one day by quantum, but the analogy analogy really is, is solid. So the idea is how do you communicate across fiber between or by satellite, between two different entities, whether they be computers or sensors or memories or repeaters. How do you communicate in a way where that process stays quantum so that you truly have the sort of spreading of quantum information across a larger network structure? So Qunnect started off literally like in, in 2020 spending a lot of time thinking about what were the basic devices that support something called entanglement distribution, which is sending entangled photons through fiber but preserving that entanglement, that very special quantum property.
So how do you do that across a network? And it sounds like a very simple problem, but in order to keep the fidelity high, which is what you need in order to, to do something quantum, you have a lot of devices you need in between. So our rack system basically serves the purpose of generating that entanglement, distributing it, preserving it while it's distributed and validating it on the other side. So it's basically like providing currency to do quantum networking across fiber. - No, exactly what, what Noel said is a very important point even for us that are in the field, I barely could name like 10% of the actual hardware that exists out there that are enabling this communication right now that we have in, in the digital communication, we usually nowadays interface with the software almost all thanks to how robust and reliable the hardware has gotten that we don't even need to worry about it anymore. We don't even need to know what is the telecommunication hardware. It just exists as an infrastructure we build on top of that.
Quantum is just emerging, it's just coming out of the labs and entering the new world. It's not here to replace the digital communication, it's here to add advantages to it and of course eventually to allows us to connect quantum devices to each other. And a lot of the things we do at Qunnect, it's all around this idea that we want to bring similar level robustness to these technologies so they actually can be used as infrastructure.
So like a ton of things that we publish are not about like, hey, we did this very state of the art nature paper is about us doing an experiment that worked 24/7, always with distributed entanglement. There was never a downtime. So the things that like brings these technologies a step and a step closer to real world use cases. - Okay, so you, you mentioned entanglement, quantum internet, quantum communications and not substituting the traditional internet but adding on it. Can you go a little bit deeper on that? Who, what does that mean adding more to those layers and who uses this today or who needs this? - In its first generation, whenever we were talking about quantum communications, we were talking about a process called quantum key distribution. So this came out, again, more than 10 years ago and there are companies that provide hardware for this specific purpose and it's very, very much like the title sounds.
So it uses, you know, a process in order to distribute keys, which has quantum in it, right? That technology didn't rely on the same tools that we have today. In fact, one of the things which our field has benefited from both on the quantum computing side and on the quantum networking side is that the devices, the enabling devices themselves have become much better. And something that Qunnect does exceptionally well is that we, we built this entanglement source, the thing that generates the entangled photons, but if you're talking 10 years ago, entanglement sources were not something that were common. We do it differently and arguably much better because you know, we, we designed ours with something specific in mind, right? But I think that when you start thinking about what does it mean to, to build a, a larger network structure, et cetera, you have to start thinking about what does it mean to create devices which interface with each other and can support things beyond a simple single application. QKD was a, a single application type build.
So when the first generation came out it was, they built products expressly for that purpose and it was never intended to go further. The reason we think of ourselves more as infrastructure is because our networking core equipment may do secure communications today, but it can do other things later. And what Mehdi was talking about earlier, which is really one of our core focus points at Qunnect, is this idea of augmentation. How can quantum augment normal digital networking? Because we're not likely to rip out the entire digital network and just put in a quantum one, right? So what are the things that it can provide today that are beneficial over what, what we have today in in digital? And one of those things is security, augmented security. So the company treats this very seriously because I, I think that they're sort of naturally aligned with applications in finance, critical infrastructure and defense.
And we've been interested in exploring this for some time, but we have, we've built this infrastructure which now has some sort of, I would say improved, improved performance across what people were thinking as just normal networking, but now can act as a physical overlay for the security template. Now let Mehdi speak a little bit about what those are - Exactly. Digital communication, the same way as as like computers, they have a lot of advantages that are irreplaceable. You can actually show theoretically with normal computers also like digital internet is incredibly fast as evident by this conversation right now and streaming and everything. Quantum is not there to make it more fast. We want to use quantum to make the current internet for example significantly more secure.
But, more importantly, considering how fast the whole quantum industry is moving forward, the development of quantum computers, quantum sensors, our current internet gained its true meaning when it started connecting all devices together, like what is the internet if you unplug all the computers and internet of things off it, like what is left of the web these days? The true, the true use case of internet is the connectivity. Quantum devices, they cannot be connected with digital internet whatsoever because they work on a quantum level fundamentally, these qubits that, the way they work. So if you want to connect two quantum sensors, two quantum computers to each other, you have to make sure that the connection between them was also perfectly quantum. It was entangled the same way that entanglement is used between two qubits sitting right next to each other in a superconducting chip or an ion-trapped chip. You need that entanglement across your city also if you're connecting to quantum computers and that's what quantum internet could do for us.
It's specifically gonna connect quantum computers. Your normal computer can still connect through the internet but, but the way we are moving forward with all the advantages that we're funding for quantum computers and quantum sensors, inevitably one day we need to connect all this together to even further enhance the power of these technologies. - As you know, most of the press and the, the media out there when they cover quantum and most of the people that you talk about, your friends, your family, it's they associate quantum to quantum computers. They think the only thing you can do in the quantum technologies is quantum computers and paraphrasing you, we have to connect those quantum computers and quantum sensors with entanglement and what you guys are building. Does this mean that you need to wait until quantum computers are ready to have Qunnect products scaling? Or what are you guys doing today while those quantum computers are getting ready? - Quantum is not a just in time technology, there's nothing simple about developing quantum products.
And the reality is, you can't just be like, oh, build the computers and then that justifies that somebody starts doing basic research to build the infrastructure. That doesn't work. But I think what's becoming more in I think a more commonly held belief, as of 2025, is that everybody, everybody is starting to understand that there are scaling limitations in all current quantum computing modalities. And one of the great ways to overcome that is to start addressing the question of networking.
And networking can be on the micro scale, which is literally connecting the QPUs to each other within a freezer or within a a very small space. Or they can be at the more macro scale, like what we do, which is something that would be at the level of data centers or even from building to building or or long distances. - No, no, exactly.
Like I think if you look at out all the quantum companies that exist there in the quantum networking space, you'll find the companies and the startups that are very specifically and solely focused on the mission of connecting quantum computers to each other. It's very important because, more and more, we're learning that it might be an inevitable thing, quantum computers on their own, you cannot fit enough qubits on a single chip or a single quantum computer to get to the real power of a quantum computer. So a lot of com companies are focused on that connectivity between quantum computers and then you find a lot of com companies who are very focused on the use case quantum networking has today--cybersecurity, QKD, key generations, things like that. And then it's us who, basically trying to do all of them, but in steps. We are not trying
to like carry everything together, but we are building the technology that literally today, we can use it for applications, very different applications in cybersecurity, but we designed the hardware from the core of it in a way that it'd be also compatible when we connected to quantum sensors or quantum computers. Like we went out of our way to build all of our devices so they can actually be used on both or all the fronts. Mostly because, obviously, we wanted to have revenue and market today but also have a much larger and revenue market 10 years from now. So, which which makes sense for for a company. - Great. So thank you so much. This is very helpful. At the same time you, you mentioned before, you've been on this for more than a decade and things have changed a lot.
I remember when I started discovering about the quantum threat, post-quantum cryptography, quantum key distribution, QRNG, around seven, eight years ago almost no one really was talking about it. And in the last two th three years I've seen more and more like CSOs from different major banks at conferences that have nothing to do with quantum, non-quantum conferences, bringing up the subject of quantum resiliency, quantum security, quantum communications, quantum network. What changes have you seen in the last decade and why would an investor have to invest money in Qunnect right now? - I think this changed a lot in the last decade, so, so, notably, there was a QRNG company called ID Quantique.
They had, they had this years ago and it was because there was great interest in QRNGs, actually, being a source of randomness for things like the chips that ended up in the, the Samsung cell phones, right? So I think there was, there was a lot of great interest and a lot of great buzz at that time and certainly, key generation still uses a lot of QRNGs and there are active companies today doing it in different ways for exactly that reason. But I think the next step deeper was to start to address where, where can we use entanglement in order to do things like the connection of QPUs, the connection of, of two remote points when you're trying to do, truly, a secure communication line. To do that required actually being able to share entanglement. And that's, it's a complicated problem because you have to have exceptionally good entanglement to start with. You have to have some way to be able to preserve it while it's, it's going from place to place and then you have to have some way to use it on the end.
So the interface is, Mehdi was talking about earlier, between the transmission lines and the device can can be something which ends up being so lossy that it, it makes no difference, right? If you had great, great communication in between but then you can't partner it with anything, then it doesn't matter. So the, the devil's in the details when it comes to everything in quantum networking and I think that what we've seen in the past five years, right? So the first thing was when we've started, we were the only quantum memory company and we started as a quantum memory company trying to build quantum repeaters. Now there's eight or nine different quantum memory companies globally, many of which attacking the problem of either quantum repeaters or this idea of scaling quantum computers because they're very interrelated. So, seeing memory technologies that were very research heavy start to come to the forefront.
That's interesting. And then the second part is that, that people are starting to address some of the problems. I think we are definitely, since day one, very aware of the fact that nothing's going to work at scale if you don't start addressing all of the little details that matter along each part of the planning, particularly for infrastructure. And Mehdi and his team have, have literally taken the hard road more than once in order to try to deal with things that we knew wouldn't work at scale to really drill down on the details and to try to discover how it is that we can make things work more effectively. - What is so important about the quantum memory and the quantum repeaters that I, I know it's very important, but can you help us understand that for those that are not that familiar? - So these are a little bit two different questions. So the, the, the story is that one of the things that gives quantum its core power is its randomness, statistics and probability works very differently.
And it's actually the main reason why quantum computers are good. It has little to do with superposition, it has a lot to do with how statistics works with, with with quantum particles, qubits or whatever. But randomness always has a price, especially when you use it for communication because we use particles of lights for communication. That's basically the only type of particles you could use for communication photons the same way that like all the optical communication is well with light photons are very suitable for communication. They're very low loss and interact. They don't interact with the medium that much.
But the problem with the randomness is that you can't really keep track of when do you have a photon. When you don't have the photon, it's hard to actually scale up quantum networks unless you have a device that can buffer for you to make up for this randomness that exists in quantum. So you can actually, like every time you get a photon in this side, you store it for a little bit of time while the other node also gives a, gives you a photon so they arrive at another node at the same time. You need to be able to synchronize these things so you can deploy them in much larger scales that, and we do right now and in generally when it becomes like global and quantum memories can do that for you. They're basically very short-lived buffers.
Like we don't even need them to live that long because light travels very fast. A millisecond for light is a very, very long distance traveling in a fiber or freer space, we just need them to be able to preserve the photon but it preserves its quantumness for just a millisecond so the other photon can arrive and then at that point we know they're together and we do like different use cases and experiments with them. So that's why not just us, a very large number of companies out there trying to build this, this quantum memory is capable of doing this, but the name memory is a little bit misleading because we are used to memories that can permanently keep things. These are basically buffers.
They just store it for a little bit of time and then they give the photons back to you. The repeaters is the other side of the story that just like communication, the normal telecommunication that has repeaters because fiber optics are very lossy. If you don't have something to constantly read your data, copy it, multiplies it and then send it forward, you cannot be able to like extend your distances. Classically, that was very, very easy. Building an amplifier--it's a small box that you've seen it a lot in your life. You just didn't even know that that's what is, that's the box is out there in the fibers and in the world.
But in quantum, it's very tricky because in quantum, you're not supposed to read the qubit, you are not supposed to touch the qubit, you have to preserve its quantumness. So we have to go through a lot of like complicated processes to how to increase the distance of these photons without actually looking at the photons. It's a little bit of a magical process that we and a lot of other companies and research groups trying to build them.
- Well it's a magical process. How do you copy information when the information - without knowing the information - gets deleted when you look at it? - Yeah, exactly. Funny enough, you can even do that with entanglement, basically.
- Okay. - That's the power of teleportation. Teleportation can teleport quantum information for you without you even knowing what that information was. - So I just read the article today, "China publishes a new quantum record," a quantum computer record, I think it was a hundred and something qubits. I haven't read the details on the level of error correction, but we see that every month, right? It was Microsoft two weeks ago, it was Google one month ago, and it will be IBM in two months.
And over and over, like all the players keep on surpassing themselves and it's a, it's a beautiful time. It's, it's kind of like the space race and that's pushing everyone going very fast. What is the GPT moment for Qunnect or for the industry? What is, and more or less, not the exact date, but what needs to happen in the next two to seven years that it will make everyone go crazy about all quantum computers and quantum communications? - Yeah, we always hedge to use this term, right? But quantum advantage right, needs to be shown so that it justifies the cost of the devices. And I think we've become very used to the fact that devices and networking are inexpensive. So, we have to be patient. I mean, again, the digital internet took decades to get to where we are today.
So we have, we have to understand that there is a pace of technology miniaturization and cost reduction in manufacturing, et cetera. But I think that the widespread use starts to open up all of the different applications that, that are possible. The thing which will justify the cost of miniaturization is basically finding the application that ends up being the advantage, which is necessary. And I think that's probably, in the near term, going to be in security because it's, it's sort of the low-hanging fruit of all of the other options.
After that, after the devices start to be more industry hardened, I suspect that the, the next killer apps, so to speak, will be these data center applications, but quantum computers have a long way to go before they're all ready to be wired to each other. So, it's a little bit further in the future. - Yeah, no, exactly. I mean quantum always has that famous "Q day." It's not my favorite day, shouldn't be anyone's favorite day.
The day quantum computers could crack RSA codes and classical networks and that's, generally, an important point forward in technology because we are talking about a new hardware that is now very capable and we actually don't know how powerful it is, no one really knows how powerful it is. I know, and it's a great thing that we are already deploying a ton of software solutions to counter it, post-quantum algorithms, algorithms that we know are potentially resilient to, for example, Shor's algorithm for quantum computers. But the problem of quantum computer is not the Shor's algorithm, it's the quantum computer. It's how powerful the computer is and how many people, when it's, when everyone has access to them, how many people are gonna come with how many new algorithms that could potentially easily hack into anything that is mathematically protected out there.
The same with any, pretty much, algorithm that exists. The only thing that we know that is security is guaranteed by the nature and the universe is entanglement itself, which is not surprising. It's literally what is building those computers that we are gonna try to use to use it to protect our network.
So, like for example, one of the things that we are working on a ton of different groups are right now working on is this idea of quantum position verification. It's something that is classically impossible to do, to be able to verify someone's position, to be able to say that I'm talking to a server that is in a specific location and I can verify that it's physically there. You cannot do that with digital communication, but you could do that with quantum entanglement in a way that you can actually prove that it's impossible for someone to trick you unless they actually do something, they have to communicate with like another friend of them faster than the speed of light.
They have to crack like interdimensional travel to be able to hack into these networks. Like that's how unlikely it is to be able to, to do these things. And those are the type of securities we are hoping to eventually become more custom. Type of security that
they don't depend on the hardware that the hacker has access to because it's definitely not wise to give this extremely powerful tool to everyone and then hope that whatever algorithm we came up with 20 years ago by this, or like 10 years ago is gonna be resilient to whatever people are gonna come up with with a very massively more powerful quantum computer. - Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Entanglement is such a beautiful thing and crazy that only when we really learn how to use it, I, I can't imagine the number of applications that are gonna come out of it, but as you mentioned, like security and identification is the, the, and communications are the, the most obvious ones. Imagine SoftBank comes now and says, I totally believe in your vision and I have a billion dollar extra, how will you spend a billion dollars? - You know, I, one of the things that we, so we, we've also been sort of notoriously lean and thrifty.
So we are, we're kind of the definition of, you know, the, the great lean startup model. I will say that, that doesn't always have advantages, but we're proud of it anyway. If we had more investment than, you know, we were anticipating now, if we were flush with cash, I think we would start to attack some of the problems that are always one step further away from us.
So, a a great example of that is the miniaturization and sort of the, the optimized for manufacturing piece. So Qunnect's rather proud of the fact that, unlike a lot of quantum companies that talk about having revenue from actually selling things, that we actually manufacture and sell devices, which is what we call revenue. So, those right now are very expensive to build because they get built by hand just like any artisanal product might get built.
And we would like to push that to the level like everyone else would like to see, which is, effectively, something which is a miniaturized sort of chipped style format. This in a wildly expensive process, it takes a lot of, a lot of people and a lot of cash to get it there. I think now we're, we're rather convinced that we know what we would like to miniaturize.
So I think that having basically pioneered the devices themselves, we now know what it is that we would want to build, which was an open question as of a few years ago, but now that we're there, it would be really great to be able to, to push it towards something which actually allows for that transition where we can get the cost so low that the technology itself starts to be something that's more commonplace. - Great. Well, I know we have to come to an end and too bad because I'm learning so much and I'm, I always love talking to you guys. Any last message that you would like to share to anyone out there either interested in learning more about Qunnect or any company things that I know the top a hundred or top 200 companies in the world are all looking at this or working on this one way or another, one of the quantum technologies, either quantum encryption, quantum communications, quantum hardware, anything.
What would you say, for example, to those that are still not doing something in the field? - Again, I think that quantum existed previously as a sort of frontier tech, exotica sort of technology, and that's going back maybe five years ago, right? Now, it's become way more mainstream, but it's also at this wave as you were talking about earlier, because there's so many press announcements that I think it gets misrepresented at times across the industry. There's obviously a lot of hype going on and I think that while hype is good for maintaining both public interest and investor interest in the field, there's also something to be said for the fact that if you're actually plowing weight your way forward to solve real problems, right? We should represent these things as well. And sometimes they don't seem quite as newsworthy or splashy. At the same time,
it's important for the field to show what it can do for real because that very solid underpinning will keep this from being something which is eventually some type of of bubble. And I, I've always, I know Mehdi feels the same way. I've always disliked the fact that we would think of quantum networking as only useful when something terrible happens. Like Q day. We should think of it as an opportunity to invest in something which is, is a, a long-term, you know, project in R&D in order to get something which is truly good commercial utility. And we've come to accept those types of timelines in other types of heart technologies like biotech.
So there is no therapeutic that comes to market because it was just like magically invented in two years, right? These things have long, long timelines and I would say that quantum exists in the same realm. We need to invest in it now because we know that having capabilities in the future is important. - And we have a lot of learnings from the internet era and we have AI and many more people working on this.
When I think about the number of PhDs and technical people working on the internet in the sixties versus the people that are working on this today, it's, I don't know if you are 10 or a hundred x bigger right now, - But you know, it also started as a, I mean BBN, which is, you know, plays a, a major role in the early, early days of this, right? Was basically a think tank, right? And we have, definitely, a lot more people that are are, and venture capital, of course, didn't exist in those days the way it does now either, right? So venture capital is an important part of the story in terms of being able to, to support a large number of solutions to evolve simultaneously. And America, obviously, has been doing this well for the past five to 10 years in the quantum space. So it'll be exciting to see what, what the next five to 10 years has in store, - Mehdi, any last thing you would like to add? - Quantum is an investment. The same way that with, with AI, it was, and it played off differently for different Fortune 500 companies. We literally, actually right now working with Fortune 500 companies, who, funny enough, are now more interested in quantum because they learned a lesson with AI because they joined AI, they are now a pioneer in AI, but they paid 10 times, a hundred times more money to get there. They instead of like spending 500 million, they ended up spending $20 billion to get there because they waited too long.
The GPT movement happened and suddenly, all the startups, all the companies were 10 times the, the valuation for example, and they caught up, but the price tag was very, very different for them. So now they don't want, the same thing happens to them in quantum either. And again, each company have their own least risk tolerant, their own business model. But quantum is literally getting to that moment. 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was always this joke of like, ask anyone, they tell you in 10 years we have quantum computers, no matter when you ask. But now we are really in a space that people constantly give you answers that are like, realistically, it's within a few years, there are a lot of potential of big things happening soon.
And if you miss that moment, you can catch up. That's totally doable. It's just the, the, the level of investment is gonna be orders of magnitude different to catch up with it. And so, yeah, so I think, but, but I think that AI actually became a good lesson for a lot of companies to, to start paying attention for, to technologies like this that they still require development, but their potential is so massive that if they missed the the train, it's, it's gonna be a very costly thing for them to catch up. - I love that. Thank you so much for taking the time. This was really, really helpful.
- Of course. - Yeah, thank you. - Always a pleasure.
2025-05-10 15:27
