Aegiq is a UK quantum photonics start-up, spun out from the University of Sheffield. Building on over 20 years of world class research in semiconductors and quantum science, we are developing secure quantum communication for fiber-optic and satellite based applications.
We’ve recently closed our seed round bringing our total investment to £4 million to help deliver our first product, research-grade sources of quantum light to the market. With this, we’re looking to scale our vision to provide high performing quantum technology for next-generation telecoms and datacomms.
What do you think makes this company unique?
The quantum technology sector is rapidly growing. While this is a nascent market, looking ahead, it will offer ample opportunities to the economy, and quantum tech will impact almost every aspect of our lives.
With this huge potential, our value proposition is to make quantum technology for telecoms, spacecomms, and datacentres deployable on a global scale. By doing this we help unlock new revenue streams for customers using our technology.
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How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
Aegiq has grown significantly within the past few years. From just a few founders to now a company of 10 employees, we are actively growing our core research and development team.
We are now the leading company developing III-V semiconductor-based quantum photonics (manufacturing chips using elements such as Gallium, Indium and Arsenic rather than traditional Silicon). This is accepted as a far stronger method in terms of reliability and security, which has leveraged existing industrial processing techniques.
We have won support from Innovate UK (UK Government agency that provides money and support to organisations to make new products and services) in competitive funding programmes. Aegiq is now part of multiple collaborative funded projects, which are worth collectively over £20 million, and is now also part of all key quantum industry organisations around the world.
What can we hope to see from Aegiq in the future?
Moving forward we’ll be developing scalable networking for the quantum era, which is the linchpin that is needed to truly bring to life the impact of quantum technologies, from computing to sensing. Fully-fledged quantum computers are still some years away, but our digital data is already at a huge risk with ‘store today, decrypt later’ type attacks.
Our vision is to ensure that people around the world can trust their tech in any daily interactions to ensure their data is safe. The only way to do this is with quantum technology.
