Arq Raises $1.4 Million to Build Quantum Repeaters for a Future Quantum Internet

Arq, a quantum networking startup founded in 2025, has raised a $1.4 million pre-seed round to develop the hardware needed to link quantum computers over long distances. The round was led by Ground State Ventures, with Big Sur Ventures joining. The money will fund a lab rather than a finished product, which is worth keeping in mind against the quantum-internet framing.

How Arq’s quantum repeaters work

According to the July 16 press release, the core problem Arq targets is that you can’t extend a quantum link the way you extend a normal one. Regular networks boost a fading signal by copying and amplifying it, but a quantum state can’t be copied without destroying it. The answer is a quantum repeater, and Arq’s version uses quantum memories made from rare-earth-doped crystals, paired with sources of photon pairs, to interface with ordinary fiber-optic lines.

Its claimed edge is multiplexing, storing many photons at once so several communications can run in parallel, the same trick that makes the classical internet fast. The company says this makes its repeater more reliable, faster, and cheaper than other approaches, though those are its own claims.

Why investors are betting on Arq this early

That said, a $1.4 million pre-seed funds a lab focused on making Arq’s quantum memory devices reproducible and reliable, not a shipping product, and a working quantum internet remains years off and unproven at scale. The investors’ framing, that quantum networks are moving “from a physics experiment to infrastructure,” is still a pitch.

What gives the round substance is the founders’ track record. Samuele Grandi and Emanuele Distante previously worked on an early multiplexed, telecom-compatible quantum repeater and demonstrated light-matter entanglement across tens of kilometers of city fiber. Turning that lab work into deployable hardware is the company’s actual test.