en.Wedoany.com Reported - Quantum Bridge Technologies Inc. (QBT) officially announced on May 20 the completion of an $8 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Primo Capital SGR, an independent alternative asset management company based in Italy, with joint participation from multiple global investment institutions, including Wayra (the innovation arm of Telefónica), Cadenza VC, the angel investor network Investors Club, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Bacchus Venture Capital.
Combined with previous capital rounds supported by entities such as Alumni Ventures and the University of Toronto, the completion of this Series A round brings QBT's total cumulative funding to $16 million. This private equity injection will be specifically used to expand engineering capabilities and deploy its quantum-safe network defense platform at scale across international banking, telecommunications, government, and sovereign military sectors.
Founded in 2019, QBT was spun out from a top-tier quantum security research group at the University of Toronto, co-founded by Mattia Montagna and Hoi-Kwong Lo. The company's core product is a Symmetric Key Distribution System, whose technological foundation is a patented Distributed Symmetric Key Establishment protocol.
The design philosophy of the DSKE protocol is fundamentally different from traditional encryption systems that rely on public key infrastructure. The protocol distributes random data fragments through multiple independent security hubs, utilizing a secret sharing mechanism to ensure that no single node can reconstruct the complete key. This fundamentally eliminates the single point of failure risk inherent in centralized key management, while circumventing the mathematical complexity assumptions upon which public key infrastructure depends. Since it does not use asymmetric cryptography at all, DSKE is inherently resistant to "harvest now, decrypt later" attack strategies targeting the post-quantum era.
The SDS platform integrates DSKE with Post-Quantum Cryptography and Quantum Key Distribution into a single crypto-agile platform, compatible with standardized interfaces such as ETSI GS QKD 014. It can be embedded into existing firewalls, VPN gateways, or WAN encryption devices without requiring changes to the network architecture. This design allows enterprises to overlay a quantum-safe protection layer without disrupting existing business operations, thereby significantly lowering the migration barrier.
On the strategic ecosystem front, QBT has completed several key deployments. In March 2026, the company, together with Toshiba Europe Ltd., jointly demonstrated the first intercontinental quantum-safe communication network at the OFC 2026 conference, interconnecting quantum key distribution metropolitan area networks in Cambridge and Toronto across the ocean using the DSKE protocol. In April 2026, Italian system integrator Italtel and QBT officially signed an international strategic cooperation agreement at the Canadian Embassy in Rome, introducing the quantum-safe network architecture to the European telecommunications, banking, and public utility markets. Previously, Juniper Networks also established the industry's first quantum-safe networking solution partnership with QBT. Even earlier, in January 2025, QBT's ML-KEM cryptographic module received certification under the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program, confirming that its technology meets the highest standards for quantum-safe encryption.
Mara Attardi, an investment professional at Primo Capital SGR, stated in a release: "Leading this funding round marks a decisive milestone for Primo Capital in establishing a footprint in the quantum technology sector—a domain we view as the cornerstone of digital resilience for the next decade. QBT immediately stood out due to the versatility of its architecture and the unique capabilities of its team, with the company's CEO possessing both deep academic rigor and the commercial acumen needed to navigate the complexities of global institutional markets."
Mattia Montagna, Co-founder and CEO of QBT, noted: "National security cannot wait for perfect conditions. We are building quantum-safe systems designed to operate in real-world networks and protect sovereign communications as the threat landscape continues to evolve. This funding will allow us to meet the current practical needs of more organizations and provide them with protection more quickly." The company revealed that some financial institutions and government agencies have entered the technical testing phase, while other customers have already begun deploying its solutions to protect their data and systems.
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