The first thing you notice about Qunnect's Carina rack is that it looks boring. Not boring in a bad way: boring in the way a Cisco router is boring. It sits in a server cabinet at room temperature, blinking quietly, doing something that for two decades lived only inside dilution refrigerators and physics-department basements. In Brooklyn, one of these racks is sending entangled photons under the East River to another rack in Manhattan, 17.6 kilometers of standard telecom fiber away [Mondo News]. The photons arrive. The entanglement holds. Nobody has to wear a lab coat.
That is the bet Qunnect is making, and it is a more specific bet than the phrase "quantum internet" usually implies. The Brooklyn-based company sells hardware, not promises: a product line called Carina that includes entanglement sources and the stabilization tools that keep quantum signals coherent across messy real-world fiber [Qunnect Press Release, 2025]. The company says it commercialized the first room-temperature quantum memory in 2021 [Qunnect Press Release, 2025], and it has been shipping Carina units to customers ever since. The wedge is unglamorous and important: if quantum networking is ever going to leave the lab, somebody has to build the equivalent of the patch panel, the repeater, and the line card. Qunnect would like to be that somebody.
The deployment list is what makes the story interesting right now. Carina is running in a live quantum testbed in New York City connecting NYU and Columbia [New Scientist]. It is installed in Berlin as part of a partnership with Deutsche Telekom's T-Labs [PRNewswire]. It went live at Montana State University in September, anchoring what the company describes as the first quantum entanglement network in the Northwestern United States [Qunnect Press Release, 2025-09-09]. In November, Roadrunner Venture Studios and Qunnect launched ABQ-Net, New Mexico's first quantum network [Qunnect, 2025]. CERN's newly inaugurated quantum lab is using Carina alongside Single Quantum's detectors for networking experiments [Qunnect, 2025]. And in October, the U.S. Air Force tapped Qunnect to advance quantum networking for defense applications [Qunnect Press Release, 2025-10-09]. Five live or pilot networks across two continents and a defense contract is a real customer footprint, even if each individual deployment is still small.
The money has followed, modestly but from the right addresses. Qunnect raised an $8.5 million Series A in 2022 [Future of Computing] and added a $10 million extension in June 2025, led by Airbus Ventures with participation from Cisco Investments [Qunnect, 2025]. The cap table also includes Quantonation, SandboxAQ, New York Ventures, Hamamatsu Ventures, Impact Science Ventures, and Motus Ventures. That is a deeptech-literate group: Quantonation is one of the few funds dedicated entirely to quantum, Cisco Investments brings networking-industry signal, and Airbus Ventures has been patient with long-cycle hardware before. The company also graduated from Creative Destruction Lab's Quantum Stream, which has become something of a finishing school for the category.
Series A (2022) | 8.5 | $M
Series A Extension (2025) | 10 | $M
If quantum networking matures on the timeline that government and telecom buyers are currently planning for, the company that supplies the entanglement-source hardware those networks run on is positioned to become a default infrastructure vendor for an entirely new layer of telecommunications. The use cases the company points to span finance, energy, telecom, and defense [PRNewswire, 2026], and they tend to share a structure: organizations that already care about cryptographic security and are willing to pay for hardware that arrives in a rack and plugs into existing fiber. Telecom operators in particular have an obvious interest in being able to offer quantum key distribution and, eventually, entanglement-based services on the fiber they already own. The Deutsche Telekom partnership and the Cisco investment hint at how that distribution could eventually look.
The team has the science-and-shipping blend the category requires. CEO Noel Goddard, who has led the company since 2020, is described as bringing a dual background in science and entrepreneurship [Laser Focus World]. CTO Mael Flament and CSO Mehdi Namazi co-founded the company alongside Stony Brook physicist Eden Figueroa, whose lab work on room-temperature quantum memory underpins the core IP. Headcount sits at roughly 32 [PitchBook], which is small enough to ship fast and large enough to support multiple concurrent customer deployments, which the recent press cadence suggests they are doing.
The honest counterfactual is the one every quantum hardware company faces: the timeline to a true quantum internet, with repeaters and routers and end-to-end entanglement distribution at continental scale, is measured in years, possibly decades, and the path runs through component physics that nobody has fully solved. Bears will note that larger players, including IBM and the national-lab ecosystem, have far deeper R&D budgets, and that early customer deployments in this category often resemble research collaborations more than recurring revenue. The bull answer, supported by the cited deployment list, is that Qunnect has chosen to compete on a narrower axis: ruggedized, room-temperature, rack-mountable hardware that works today on installed fiber. The Air Force contract [Qunnect Press Release, 2025-10-09] and the Cisco check [Qunnect, 2025] suggest that buyers who take quantum networking seriously already see a reason to standardize on somebody, and Qunnect is one of the few somebodies actually shipping.
What to watch over the next twelve months is whether the deployment list converts into a repeatable commercial motion. The signals to track: a named telecom customer beyond the T-Labs research partnership, a follow-on defense contract that moves from research to operational pilot, and the shape of the next funding round, which on the current cadence would likely arrive in late 2026. If Carina racks keep showing up in more cities, the question stops being whether quantum networking is real and starts being whose hardware it runs on.
The cultural question Qunnect is implicitly answering is the one the entire quantum sector has been dancing around for a decade: what does it look like when this technology stops being a demo and starts being a dial tone?