Qunnect: Industry Trailblazer in Quantum Internet

Maël Flament is the co-founder and CTO of Qunnect, a pioneering company at the forefront of building the quantum internet. He has spent the past decade turning laboratory research into deployable infrastructure. An alumnus of the Activate Fellowship, he has navigated the world of deep-tech commercialization while helping grow Qunnect into one of the world's most advanced quantum technology startups.

Qunnect’s mission is simple but bold: to develop the foundational technologies required for scalable, entanglement-based quantum networks. These networks promise to transform global communication by enabling secure transmission that’s not just encrypted - but secured by the laws of physics themselves and quantum entanglement. To achieve this, Qunnect develops and commercializes quantum hardware that is engineered for the real world: operating at room temperature, integrated into standard telecom infrastructure, and designed to scale.

What started as a single-product company around quantum memories has grown into a full-stack quantum networking provider. Qunnect’s two founders, Maël and Mehdi Namazi, brought on Noel Goddard in 2020 as CEO to drive growth and spur outside investment. As a result, the company’s product suite now includes high-rate narrow-bandwidth entanglement sources, robust broadband quantum memories, and polarization/phase stabilization tools for long-distance entanglement distribution, and more. In 2023, Qunnect deployed GothamQ, a first quantum network of its kind, to distribute entanglement in real-world conditions in one of the most challenging urban environments: New York City.

Qunnect is backed by leading investors, and works closely with national labs, major telecoms, and global research institutions. As CTO, Maël leads the company’s engineering efforts, with an eye toward building quantum repeaters, and driving the technical roadmap needed to scale quantum communication globally.

We sat down with Maël to learn how Qunnect’s breakthroughs moved from the lab to the real world—and how Qunnect is overcoming the challenges of building and scaling completely new technologies. 

Maël Flament (Cohort 2020), co-founder and CTO of Qunnect

“Programs like Activate are essential for the deep-tech community, helping founders navigate the unique challenges of bringing breakthrough technologies to market.”

What has been the most difficult part of bringing Qunnect to life?

Honestly, there was no instruction manual for any part of the journey. We are building a completely new technology. In the early days, we didn’t have a clear roadmap, not just on the tech side but also on the business and political fronts. Programs like Activate are essential for the deep-tech community, helping founders navigate the unique challenges of bringing breakthrough technologies to market.

Along the way, we’ve hit fundamental physics or engineering roadblocks and always referred back to first principles to solve them. That kind of uncertainty can be tough. However, keeping the team focused and motivated through those stretches is what ultimately shaped our culture—forcing us to be scrappy, creative, and resilient.

For me, the hardest part wasn’t the physics. That’s my co-founder Mehdi’s headache (pictured). My challenge was moving the quantum hardware outside the lab. Quantum memories and entanglement sources are notoriously delicate. Many systems today still rely on cryogenics, vacuum setups, and highly skilled operators. From day one, our goal was to go beyond that: plug-and-play systems that can be deployed in data centers and telecom environments. That meant making tradeoffs, prioritizing room-temperature operation over lab-grade performance, simplifying hardware, automating calibration, and engineering around the realities of the field: thermal drift, polarization changes, and uptime requirements.

Another challenge was belief—both convincing others, and sometimes us, that this could work outside of theory. We’ve faced our fair share of skepticism, especially from investors or partners who thought a quantum internet was still decades away. Noel, Mehdi and I had to earn trust, prove performance, and show we could deliver something tangible and scalable. Convincing telecoms and infrastructure players to bet on a startup isn’t easy, but now we’ve got live deployments running and products heading to customers around the world.

At the end of the day, bringing Qunnect to life has been about more than just building the tech; it’s also about forming a team and breaking the perception that quantum is always 10 years away.

“Every new node and system delivery sends the same message: quantum technology has left the lab and is entering the real world.”

Many believe quantum tech is still confined to the lab. How is Qunnect proving that scalable, real-world quantum applications are already here?

This is a misconception we’ve been actively working to dispel. At Qunnect, we’ve focused from day one on deploying quantum tech outside the lab to prove it can operate in real-world environments. A prime example is our GothamQ network in New York. It’s not a simulation or a lab demo; it’s a live metropolitan quantum network running through standard fiber beneath the city streets. We use the exact same hardware for it that we ship to customers. Our devices operate in the field, not only a scientist’s optical table. In recent tests in another city, we similarly distributed entangled photon pairs across 50 kilometers of urban fiber and recovered them reliably, despite all the noise and losses that come with a city environment. We have been able to show that Qunnect’s quantum tech can function beyond the lab in cities around the world at a metropolitan scale.

We’ve also begun delivering this technology to partners and early adopters. For example, we sold the world’s first commercial quantum memory to a national lab, where it now plays a role in their testbed. We’ve moved from benchtop experiments to full quantum links in cities. Our hardware is deployed across multiple U.S. sites and internationally. Because our systems operate at room temperature and are fiber-compatible, they install like any other networking device, albeit a learning curve is required to use them. That’s a significant shift from the fragile, one-off experiments people often associate with quantum research. But with a little training an engineer can rack a quantum box and start emitting entangled photons.

Thanks to Qunnect’s hardware our field has reached a turning point. By demonstrating quantum networking in real-world conditions and working closely with industry, we’re showing that this technology isn’t just theoretical; it’s operational. It's still early in terms of scale, but live deployments are already underway. The classical internet started the same way: early infrastructure like NSFNET/ ARPANET came before any widespread applications.

Our customers include national labs, universities, and telecom operators across the U.S., E.U., U.K., and Canada. They’re not buying our systems for science demos. They’re integrating them into their own infrastructure and, in some cases, preparing to offer services to their customers within a few years. Every new node and system delivery sends the same message: quantum technology has left the lab and is entering the real world.

Quantum breakthroughs rarely happen in isolation. What’s an example of a recent collaboration that accelerated Qunnect’s progress, and what does that tell us about the future of the field?

The future of quantum networking won’t be siloed. It’ll be collaborative and interoperable. We’re seeing this dynamic in our collaborations with groups like the Air Force Research Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Cisco. These partnerships push us to refine our products for interoperability and give us early feedback from serious users.

One of the most impactful recent industry collaborations has been with Single Quantum in the Netherlands. Their superconducting nanowire detectors are among the best in the world, and we’ve been working closely with them to integrate these detectors into our long-distance entanglement links, both in the GothamQ network and in partner deployments. This partnership highlights where the field is heading. No single company can build the quantum internet alone. The stack is too deep: memories, detectors, switches, time-taggers, lasers, frequency converters, the list goes on. The only way to move fast is by building tightly integrated ecosystems. Collaborating with hardware partners who are best-in-class in their niche allows us to focus on what we do best: entanglement distribution. It also accelerates progress, because we’re constantly stress-testing each other’s technologies in real-world conditions. These aren’t academic testbeds; they’re live deployments that force everything to work together.

It’s a bit like the early internet: different players had to cooperate before the infrastructure was even valuable. The fact that potential rivals are willing to work side by side shows how strongly we all believe in the need to build the ecosystem now. This spirit of collaboration, with companies and researchers pooling expertise across disciplines, is exactly what will take the quantum internet from theory to reality. And not just for secure communications: the real potential lies in the applications we haven’t even imagined yet.

Maël’s co-founder Dr. Mehdi Namazi, along with senior staff scientist Dr. Yang Wang during a breakthrough result on entanglement between a telecom photon and a room-temperature quantum memory.

What are the key challenges Qunnect faces in scaling quantum hardware for real-world use, and how are they being addressed?

One major challenge we’ve been tackling is manufacturing. Demand for our systems, especially the GothamRack, now exceeds what we can build in-house. To meet that demand, we’re scaling up production and working with contract manufacturers to industrialize our platform. This marks a big transition from developing lab-built prototypes to producing repeatable, supportable hardware. Scaling quantum isn’t just a scientific problem; it’s a supply chain, reliability, and user experience problem. We’re solving for all three. At the same time, we can’t let manufacturing be our singular focus. A large part of our roadmap is still in R&D, particularly on quantum repeaters. These next-generation components are essential for building large-scale quantum networks but don’t exist yet. That’s why we maintain a dual focus: part of the team is scaling manufacturing and deployments, while another part pushes forward on advanced development. It’s a balancing act, but this parallel approach ensures we can meet today’s customer needs while still advancing toward our long-term vision for the quantum internet.

Integration is another big challenge: making sure quantum systems can plug into classical infrastructure. We’ve invested in software, automation, and monitoring to make our quantum nodes as plug-and-play as possible. That’s what telecom operators expect, and that’s what we’re delivering. We run pilot programs with telecom and data center partners, and their feedback is invaluable. It helps us fine-tune our systems for ease of installation and operation. These collaborations are two-way streets: they teach us how to meet the practical demands of their networks, and we help them understand quantum systems.

Lastly, we often must overcome the credibility issues that arise from overhyped reporting and unsubstantiated claims made by some entrants to the quantum market: exaggerated claims, promising their technologies can solve climate change or already discover new pharmaceuticals, to secure massive funding rounds. That kind of hype damages perceptions of the entire field. We’ve taken a different approach: under-promise, over-deliver, and let our real-world deployments speak for themselves. We’re focused on building scalable, credible technology that works today.

“Our vision has always been ambitious, but now the market is catching up.”

Qunnect has achieved huge milestones this past year. How have these influenced your trajectory?

Each major milestone has directly shaped our trajectory, but the turning point was achieving record-setting entanglement rates on a deployed network. That changed everything. It validated years of science and engineering work and signaled to the broader ecosystem, including investors, partners, and governments, that Qunnect’s fundamental premise —that secure quantum networking—is a viable future technology and no longer speculative, but a reality. This milestone also pushed us to think bigger. Our vision has always been ambitious, but now the market is catching up. At the same time, we’ve had to evolve quickly: from a research-driven startup to a product company, and now into a scaling company, even as the technology continues to mature.

It’s also changed how we collaborate. We’re no longer just building hardware. We’re working with data centers, systems integrators, and governments to help define standards and deployment models. That shift brings new responsibilities. These milestones gave us credibility, but they also raised the bar. We’re not just prototyping anymore; we’re helping lay the foundation for what comes next.

As our systems move from the lab into the real world, we’ve had to support a growing network of partners: providing training, ensuring interoperability, and aligning around a shared goal of making quantum networking part of the global digital infrastructure. It’s a thrilling shift, and it’s only accelerating.

Read about more Activate Fellows who have moved from the lab, to commercialization, to defining new industries in Activate’s 2024 Annual Report.