Investors Back German Quantum Technology as a Cybersecurity Solution

Quan­tum Optics Jena (QOJ), a pio­neer­ing startup in the field of quan­tum tech­nol­ogy, today announced the clos­ing of an €8.5 mil­lion Series A fund­ing round. This invest­ment under­scores the grow­ing con­fi­dence in Ger­man quan­tum tech­nol­ogy and its poten­tial to rev­o­lu­tion­ize secure data transmission.

Led by Join Cap­i­tal, a lead­ing Euro­pean ven­ture cap­i­tal firm, joined by early investors ELAS Tech­nolo­gies GmbH, Fraun­hofer Tech­nolo­gies-Trans­fer Fonds, and beteili­gungs­man­age­ment Thürin­gen (bm|t) as well as busi­ness angel Malte Poll­mann, this lat­est fund­ing round will fuel QOJ’s expan­sion and accel­er­ate the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of its quan­tum key dis­tri­b­u­tion tech­nol­ogy. With its quan­tum encryp­tion, QOJ enables tap-proof com­mu­ni­ca­tion for com­pa­nies and insti­tu­tions of all sizes. The fresh cap­i­tal from this Series A will fuel expan­sion and help bring QOJ’s quan­tum key tech­nol­ogy to a wider market.

Unhackable communication, thanks to quantum optics

“We are excited to sup­port QOJ in their mis­sion to fun­da­men­tally trans­form the cyber­se­cu­rity land­scape,” said Tobias Schirmer, Part­ner at Join Cap­i­tal. “Quan­tum key dis­tri­b­u­tion is a ground­break­ing approach to data secu­rity, and QOJ is lead­ing the way in this excit­ing field.”

The QOJ team is pio­neer­ing advance­ments in cyber­se­cu­rity by har­ness­ing quan­tum optics – a tech­nol­ogy that uses entan­gled pairs of pho­tons (light par­ti­cles) to trans­mit infor­ma­tion with com­plete secu­rity. These pho­tons gen­er­ate a secret key, which is then used to encrypt and decrypt data—a method known as entan­gle­ment-based key dis­tri­b­u­tion (EKD). With this approach, mul­ti­ple users can securely com­mu­ni­cate at the same time using the gen­er­ated quan­tum keys.

Quan­tum Optics Jena is the world’s only com­mer­cial provider of such multi-party quan­tum key dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tems. The com­pany – which devel­ops hard­ware, soft­ware and ser­vices for data exchange – has received mul­ti­ple awards for its tech­nolo­gies. QOJ’s solu­tions are par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing for cus­tomers with high secu­rity require­ments, such as gov­ern­ment net­works, as well as banks that need to com­mu­ni­cate con­fi­den­tially and securely but have high risk of expo­sure to hack­ers. This tech­nol­ogy can also ben­e­fit research insti­tu­tions, small and medium-sized enter­prises, the health­care sec­tor, and soci­ety as a whole.

Global Expansion and European Quantum Communication Infrastructure Development

“Our tech­nol­ogy has moved beyond the research lab and is now ready for prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions. With this fund­ing, we can expand our pro­duc­tion capac­ity and scale our tech­nol­ogy glob­ally,” explains Dr. Kevin Füch­sel, CEO of Quan­tum Optics Jena. “I’ve had the priv­i­lege of col­lab­o­rat­ing closely with the highly skilled found­ing team at Quan­tum Optics Jena for years. Their ground­break­ing advance­ments in quan­tum tech­nol­ogy have con­sis­tently impressed me. I’m thrilled to be part of their jour­ney as they rede­fine the land­scape of secure com­mu­ni­ca­tion”, says busi­ness angel Malte Pollmann.

Quan­tum Optics Jena is already a global player and is also active in Sin­ga­pore, Spain, Aus­tria, and Slo­va­kia, with a sales office in North Car­olina, USA. Cur­rently, the com­pany is work­ing on con­nect­ing data cen­ters and crit­i­cal infra­struc­tures. In the rural area sur­round­ing the uni­ver­sity town of Jena, Ger­many, QOJ is build­ing a com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem with part­ners to securely send infor­ma­tion and patient data to the Jena Uni­ver­sity Hos­pi­tal. The com­pany is also involved in the con­struc­tion of a Euro­pean Quan­tum Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Infra­struc­ture (Euro­QCI), which is expected to be oper­a­tional across all of Europe by 2027.

About Quantum Optics Jena

Quan­tum Optics Jena was spun off from the Fraun­hofer Insti­tute for Applied Optics and Fine Mechan­ics (IOF) in Jena in 2020. The man­ag­ing direc­tors are Dr. Kevin Füch­sel and Dr. Oliver de Vries. Just a few months after Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, whose research made a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the under­stand­ing of entan­gle­ment and received the Nobel Prize in Physics, Quan­tum Optics Jena launched its first com­mer­cial solu­tions. Learn more about Quan­tum Optics Jena at www.qo-jena.com.

Investors

Join Cap­i­tal is an early-stage ven­ture cap­i­tal fund with offices in Berlin, Lon­don, and Milan that has been invest­ing in “New Indus­try” star­tups across Europe since 2017. The fund’s strat­egy focuses on deep-tech and B2B soft­ware com­pa­nies com­mit­ted to the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion of indus­try and mak­ing a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to solv­ing the major chal­lenges of our time. Join Cap­i­tal is cur­rently invest­ing from its sec­ond fund and man­ages more than €150 mil­lion in assets. Investors include the Nato Inno­va­tion Fund (NIF), KfW Cap­i­tal as well as lead­ing fund of funds and fam­ily offices. Since incep­tion, Join Cap­i­tal has already invested in a total of 25 port­fo­lio com­pa­nies and real­ized four exits.

bm‑t beteili­gungs­man­age­ment Thürin­gen (bm|t), head­quar­tered in Erfurt – a sub­sidiary of the Thüringer Auf­bau Bank – is the first point of con­tact for ven­ture cap­i­tal invest­ments in Thuringia, Ger­many. bm|t cur­rently man­ages twelve funds with a total vol­ume of €445 mil­lion and invests in inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies with strong growth poten­tial across all indus­tries and all phases of the cor­po­rate life cycle.

Fraun­hofer Tech­nolo­gie-Trans­fer Fonds (FTTF) is an inde­pen­dent early-stage ven­ture cap­i­tal investor for deep-tech star­tups using Fraun­hofer tech­nolo­gies, and the first of its kind in Ger­many. With a vol­ume of €60 mil­lion, FTTF pro­vides star­tups with cap­i­tal of up €5 mil­lion dur­ing the chal­leng­ing early phases. The FTTF is backed by its two fund investors, the Fraun­hofer-Gesellschaft and the Euro­pean Invest­ment Fund (EIF). Since its estab­lish­ment in 2019, FTTF has invested in 39 star­tups pur­su­ing inno­v­a­tive busi­ness mod­els based on a wide range of Fraun­hofer technologies.

ELAS Tech­nol­ogy Invest­ment GmbH (ELAS) is a Ger­man-based but glob­ally ori­ented finan­cial investor head­quar­tered in Ham­burg in north­ern Ger­many. ELAS was founded to pro­vide finan­cial and infra­struc­tural sup­port to promis­ing com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions in the global pho­ton­ics and high-tech industry.

Contact

Quan­tum Optics Jena GmbH | Am Zemen­twerk 8 | 07745 Jena, Ger­many | press@qo-jena.com