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An early-stage cyber security spinout from the University of Queensland has secured $2.4 million to develop a demonstration unit for its patented quantum link verification technology, which is targeting the next frontier of challenges faced by data centres globally.
Speaking on the sidelines of the UQ Ventures ScaleUP Showcase this week, VeriQuantix CEO Paul Butler told Business News Australia the seed funding round was led by Uniseed with co-funding from the UniQuest Extension Fund, PowerHouse Ventures (ASX: PVL) and Lucerne Investment Partners.
VeriQuantix’s technology, proven in a lab environment and now awaiting further development and commercial application, involves generating two identical photons that can be compared to detect the eavesdropping of data along fibre optic lines.
“You keep one of the photons in your base unit, and you send the other one down the optic fibre link using wavelength division multiplexing, incorporating it with the data - it goes down, comes back, and then it gets compared to the one that's been kept,” Butler explains.
“If anything has touched the photon, if anyone's listened in or interfered with it in any way, the quantum principle is changed.
“You’re continuously doing comparisons so you know that they're linked, and the data you’re sending across is secure.”
The first layer of the technology will be hardware, followed by software to analyse changes in wavelengths and identify the specific interference that has occurred.
“What can happen is bad actors can filter off bits of data so you don't even know you're losing data on an optic fibre – they can be just taking it and storing it for decryption at some later point when they've got quantum de-encryption,” says Butler.
“It might be really well protected with encryption now, but they can hold that data, and if you get a quantum computer that's effective at breaking the encryption, then you can decode it later.
“The risk is there today, regardless of whether they can break it. Listening in to fibre optics is happening all the time.”
The technology itself was invented by Dr Marcelo de Almeida, Professor Andrew White, Dr Till Weinhold and Dr Michael Harvey. Butler, who has been involved in startups for the last 25 years including at mining technology group GroundProbe, was appointed CEO as VeriQuantix embarked on its capital raise.
“It isn't that complex a concept, but it's a novel concept,” says
“We're applying quantum principles that are known, so we're not inventing anything new in that regard – it’s just the way they brought the technology together and applied it to a particular application.
“That provisional patent was put in place in 2022 – it’s quite important because there have been a few that have been applied for since that, but we’ve got the priority date and a very strong patent position. That’s a key part of the moat.”
The next step will be proving the technology’s commercial viability.
“We've got very clear milestones. We’re building a demonstration unit with the funding that we're able to raise, and it’s great to be able to get the support from early-stage investors to be able to get to the point where we can prove the technology works on a commercial network,” he says.
“Then we'll raise our next round and off the back of that we’ll be building a rack mounting unit that will be able to be sold into data centres.”
Butler expects it will take one year to prove the technology on a commercial network, and another year to have a product in the market for sale.
“We’d have the opportunity then to go towards miniaturisation and have a more commercially broad application of the technology, to the point where that's when your big global organisations could acquire the technology or license the technology to implement it in their own boxes to provide quantum link verification,” he says.
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