For quantum cryptography and simulation to become real, the technology requires high-performance light-emitting and light-detecting components that operate at the single-photon level and at ambient temperature. One of the few companies operating in this rarified arena is Nu Quantum. The quantum photonics company is a spin-out from the University of Cambridge.
NuQuantum is a graduate of Seraphim Space Camp Accelerator having now closed £2.1 million in seed funding in a round led by Amadeus Capital Partners . Ahren Innovation Capital, IQ Capital, Cambridge Enterprise and Martlet Capital also followed-on from the company’s pre-seed investment round last September, with Seraphim Capital joining as a new investor.
The funding will go toward a state-of-the-art photonics lab in Cambridge and a major recruitment drive for scientists, product team members and business functions as the company approaches the launch of its first commercial technology demonstration.
Nu Quantum brings together a portfolio of intellectual property combining quantum optics, semiconductor photonics and information theory, spun out of the University of Cambridge after eight years of research at the Cavendish Laboratory. Nu Quantum is one of a handful of companies in the world developing this photonics technology.
The company’s first commercial deliverable will use quantum photonic technology and proprietary algorithms to generate random numbers extracted from quantum-level effects, giving the highest confidence in the quality of these numbers, which are ubiquitously used as cryptographic keys to secure data. Nu Quantum is a partner in the consortium led by the National Physical Laboratory, developing the U.K. standard for quantum random number generation, a project which was awarded £2.8 million from the U.K. government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.
Professor Sir Peter Knight, Chair of the UK Quantum Technology Initiative Strategy Advisory Board added: “I’m delighted to see Nu Quantum, one of the UK’s leading quantum photonics companies, achieve this investment milestone to enable the translation of its founders’ world-class academic research into the commercial world.
