Qunnect
Quantum-networking hardware vendor building room-temperature rubidium-vapour quantum memories, entangled-photon sources, and telecom-band polarization-stabilisation gear as rack-mount appliances. Spun out of Eden Figueroa's group at Stony Brook University in 2017; operates GothamQ, a leased metropolitan dark-fibre testbed under New York City. Flagship Carina turnkey suite launched in 2025; in February 2026 demonstrated first metro-scale entanglement swapping over commercial fibre with Cisco at >99% polarization fidelity. Closed a USD 10M Series A extension in June 2025 led by Airbus Ventures with Cisco Investments.
Timeline
Current flagship
Carina — rack-mount entanglement-distribution suite (QU-SRC + QU-APC + detection + orchestration)
Milestones
- 2026-04Investor Cisco unveils Universal Quantum Switch — a room-temperature photonic switch that translates between polarization / time-bin / frequency / path encodings with <=4% fidelity degradation and ~1 ns electro-optic reconfiguration. Frames Cisco moving up the quantum-networking stack on top of partners like Qunnect.
- 2026-02Qunnect + Cisco demonstrate first metro-scale entanglement swapping over commercial fibre on GothamQ — 17.6 km Brooklyn-to-Manhattan via QTD's 60 Hudson Street datacentre, ~5,400 swapped pairs/hour over deployed fibre at >99% polarization fidelity (~10,000x prior benchmarks); Carina + Cisco Software Orchestrator stack, validates a spoke-and-hub model
- 2026-01Scott Faris appointed to Qunnect Board of Directors
- 2025-11Investor Cisco announces IBM x Cisco x Fermilab/SQMS quantum-networking partnership targeting microwave-to-optical transducers and networked fault-tolerant QCs by early 2030s. Frames Cisco's expanding networking-stack ambitions; Qunnect remains the rubidium-vapour-memory layer of that strategy.
- 2025-09Carina turnkey quantum-networking suite deployed at Montana State University — first entanglement-distribution network in the US Northwest
- 2025-07Carina announced as first commercially available rack-mounted quantum-networking system (entangled-pair source + APC + detection + orchestration in a server rack form factor)
- 2025-06Oversubscribed Series A extension closes at $10M, led by Airbus Ventures with Cisco Investments, Medina Ventures, Quantonation
- 2025-03Telecom-compatible photon-memory entanglement demonstrated with warm-vapour Rb memory at room temperature (86.5% fidelity, >1200 pairs/s)
- 2024-08PRX Quantum 5, 030330 — 15 days continuous polarization-entanglement distribution over 34 km of NYC deployed fibre, 99.84% uptime, 500k pairs/s through 17 dB-loss commercial channels
- 2024-04arXiv preprint of GothamQ automated polarization-entanglement distribution (later published in PRX Quantum)
- 2023-01GothamQ testbed extended into Manhattan; connects Brooklyn Navy Yard HQ to Manhattan and Queens over ~300 km of leased commercial telecom fibre
- 2022-10Series A — $8M led by Airbus Ventures with Quantonation, SandboxAQ, NY Ventures, Impact Science Ventures, Motus Ventures
- 2022Field-deployable warm-vapour Rb quantum memory demonstrated outside the lab (Phys. Rev. Applied 18, 044058)
- 2021-11First commercial quantum-memory unit sold (Qu-Mem / "Quark" room-temperature Rb memory)
- 2017Company founded as Stony Brook University spin-out from Eden Figueroa's Quantum Information Technology Lab (co-founders Figueroa, Namazi, Flament, Brill)
Roadmap
- 2026 Open Series B round — stated purpose: deeper government funding, product-roadmap advance, scalable manufacturing source ↗
- 2026 Carina deployments at additional university and national-lab testbeds; integration with DWDM classical channels source ↗
- 2026 Extend entangled-pair telecom-wavelength reach to ~100 km fibre spans via the Carina suite source ↗
- 2026 Expand spoke-and-hub GothamQ topology via 60 Hudson Street carrier-hotel datacentre, scaling Carina + Cisco Software Orchestrator entanglement-swapping demonstrations source ↗
Capability details
Quantum memory
- Platform
- rb-ensemble
- Storage time
- —
- Retrieval efficiency
- —
- Fidelity
- 0.95
- Wavelength
- 795 nm
- Mode capacity
- —
Networking
- Role
- testbed
- Products
- QU-SRC, QU-APC, QU-MEM, Carina, GothamQ
3 unverified fields
-
modalities.memory.storage_time_ms -
modalities.memory.retrieval_efficiency -
modalities.memory.mode_capacity
People
References
- paper https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/abstract/10.1103/PRXQuantum.5.030330 Automated distribution of polarization-entangled photons over deployed NYC fibre (PRX Quantum 5, 030330, 2024) — the GothamQ paper
- paper https://journals.aps.org/prapplied/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.18.044058 Field-deployable quantum memory (Phys. Rev. Applied 18, 044058, 2022)
- preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11564 High-fidelity entanglement between a telecom photon and a room-temperature quantum memory (2025)
- press https://www.qunnect.inc/posts/2025-07-31 Carina turnkey rack-mount quantum-networking system launch
- press https://physics.aps.org/articles/v17/125 APS Physics commentary on the GothamQ PRX Quantum paper
- press https://www.qunnect.inc/press-releases/2026-02-18 First metro-scale entanglement swapping on GothamQ over commercial fibre with Cisco Software Orchestrator (Feb 2026)
- press https://investor.cisco.com/news/news-details/2026/Cisco-Introduces-Universal-Quantum-Switch-Advancing-the-Path-to-a-Quantum-Network/default.aspx Cisco Universal Quantum Switch announcement (April 2026) — context milestone, investor moving up the network stack