Qunnect says quantum networks can verify location and detect fiber taps

Why it matters

Qunnect is trying to turn entanglement from a way to distribute encryption keys into a physical verification layer for network location, device identity and fiber integrity. Its deployments and government work provide test settings, while the white paper's company-reported demonstrations leave reliability, repeatability and customer adoption as the next measures of progress.

On September 23rd, Qunnect announced federal and industry work alongside a white paper outlining ways quantum networks could verify a signal's location, authenticate devices and detect tampering with fiber. For founder and CEO Noel Goddard (@NoelGoddard2), it extends a bet she says Qunnect made five years ago: quantum networking should do more than distribute encryption keys.

Goddard's path to that bet crossed several fields. She founded biotech company Goddard Labs, served as chief technology officer at Symbiotic Health and worked in seed investing before leading Qunnect. She holds a doctorate from The Rockefeller University and studied at New York University. Qunnect itself grew out of research at Stony Brook University on quantum memory that could operate at room temperature, a technical starting point for the company's effort to move quantum networking equipment out of specialized labs and onto existing telecom fiber.

The announcement pairs the new applications with work involving DARPA, In-Q-Tel, the Air Force Research Laboratory, NIST and the Department of Energy's CESER program. Qunnect says it is a DARPA contract awardee under the Quantum Augmented Network program, is on its second work program supporting national-security customers through In-Q-Tel, and is a subcontractor to GE Vernova on CESER. The announcement names the agencies and programs, but does not state contract values or deliverables for most of them.

A Qunnect release on August 13th described the DARPA work more specifically: the contract would fund development of its Carina system's polarization-compensation technology, which corrects signal changes as entangled photons travel through fiber. DARPA describes QuANET as an effort to combine quantum and conventional networking to explore security capabilities for critical infrastructure. Federal interest is tied to getting quantum systems to work alongside current networks, not replacing the fiber infrastructure those networks already use.

Security beyond key distribution

Qunnect's Carina platform distributes entangled photons over telecommunications fiber. Its white paper, "Entanglement for Security Beyond QKD", lays out three applications that use that network as a physical verification layer alongside conventional encryption.

Quantum Position Verification is intended to check where and when a signal originated, rather than relying on GPS or IP geolocation. Quantum Factor Authentication aims to verify that a device is genuine using a test based on quantum physics. Quantum Channel Protection treats the fiber itself as a sensor, with the goal of detecting taps, splices, rerouting or other interference.

Position verification checks where a user or device is; authentication checks what device is on the network; channel protection checks whether the path between endpoints has been disturbed. Qunnect argues that entanglement can provide evidence about those physical conditions that ordinary encryption, which protects data, does not supply by itself.

Qunnect calls the applications examples of "quantum advantage," but the white paper is the company's account of its research and demonstrations. It reports that Quantum Channel Protection was demonstrated on Qunnect's New York network in 2026 and shown to members of the U.S. Intelligence Community; it also describes a position-verification demonstration and work with JPMorganChase. Those are meaningful steps beyond a proposed use case, but the paper's reported network uptime and entanglement-fidelity figures describe the underlying network, not a standardized, third-party comparison of each security function against existing tools. The three applications are at different stages, and the announcement does not present them as three finished products available for purchase.

Qunnect's commercial test is whether the underlying network can be reliable and useful at metropolitan scale. The white paper describes operation over existing fiber at room temperature, and reports network demonstrations in New York and Berlin. Qunnect's announcement also points to work with Cisco and NYU in New York, Deutsche Telekom in Berlin and the state-commissioned ABQ-Net in Albuquerque. The federal relationships may put the hardware in front of security-sensitive users, while those deployments give Qunnect environments in which to develop and test applications.

A longer route from lab to network

Goddard's stated thesis grew out of an infrastructure problem: quantum information is fragile, and entanglement has to survive distribution across a real fiber network if it is to support useful services. At Stony Brook, co-founders Mehdi Namazi and Mael Flament worked with academic co-founder Eden Figueroa on room-temperature quantum-memory technology. Namazi described the company's early aim as bringing his doctoral research into a product built with engineering and software expertise. Qunnect later shifted its emphasis toward a metro-scale product suite, Carina, while continuing work on quantum memory.

That product strategy has attracted investors as well as government partners. In June 2025, Qunnect announced a $10 million Series A extension, led by Airbus Ventures, with participation from Cisco Investments and Quantonation. The earlier round was reported at $8 million, also led by Airbus Ventures, with Quantonation and In-Q-Tel participating. In-Q-Tel's roles as both investor and program partner give it a direct stake in Qunnect's ability to translate research into deployable hardware; the latest release does not disclose new financing.

NIST's post-quantum cryptography standards are ready for implementation and address the risk that future quantum computers could break widely used cryptography. NIST's cryptographic migration and Qunnect's physical checks address separate layers. Qunnect's case is that its applications can add signals about the physical world that encryption alone does not establish.

For Goddard, the opportunity is to make quantum networking useful to organizations that already operate sensitive networks, rather than wait for a future quantum internet to arrive. Qunnect has deployments and federal work to build from, and its white paper describes early demonstrations of some of the proposed security functions. The harder test will be whether those functions can be measured, repeated and integrated into customer operations at a cost and reliability that justify adding quantum hardware to networks already moving toward post-quantum cryptography.