“We fight Quantum with more Quantum”: Luxquanta’s CEO on Building Europe’s Quantum-Safe Future

Luxquanta’s CEO, Vanesa Díaz, recently joined the CEOTalks podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about quantum cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and what it takes to build a deep tech hardware company from Barcelona. Here are the key ideas from the episode.

See the complete interview (Spanish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKGwy-EQxDI&t=628s

The Quantum Threat is Already Here

A quantum computer capable of breaking today’s encryption doesn’t exist yet, but that doesn’t mean today’s data is safe. Encrypted communications can be intercepted and stored right now, then decrypted later once the computing power exists. This is known as “harvest now, decrypt later,” and it means that information with a long shelf life, such as medical records, defense communications, or government data, is already exposed, even if no one can read it yet.

Supporting these claims, Díaz points to the European Commission, Europol, and security agencies worldwide as the ones sounding the alarm: Europol Innovation Lab, “The Second Quantum Revolution“ · European Commission, “EU reinforces its cybersecurity with post-quantum cryptography”

Luxquanta’s Quantum Security Solution

Luxquanta makes hardware. We design, produce, and commercialize quantum key distribution (QKD) systems. These systems are rack-mounted machines that generate and exchange symmetric cryptographic keys encoded in quantum states of light, using the same fiber-optic infrastructure that operators already have in place.

Its specific approach, continuous-variable QKD (CV-QKD), is Luxquanta’s true differentiator. CV-QKD doesn’t require dedicated dark fiber, works with standard telecom components, and can eventually be compressed onto a photonic chip.

The security of QKD comes from quantum physics itself, rather than mathematical algorithms that need to be solved. In quantum mechanics, observing a particle changes its state. If someone intercepts the information sent between two QKD devices to generate the key while it’s in transit, the two ends of the communication can detect the interference and simply discard that key. No successful eavesdropping goes unnoticed, and no compromised key is ever used.

The company effectively replaces an old, physical way of exchanging cryptographic keys (imagine a courier traveling with a briefcase of keys) with a digital, continuous process. Machines quietly generate and exchange key material around the clock.

Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) and QKD are Meant to Work Together

Two approaches are competing to solve the same problem. The United States has largely backed post-quantum cryptography (PQC), which refers to new, more computationally intensive mathematical algorithms designed to resist attacks even from future quantum computers. It’s a software-based fix that raises the computational bar for breaking encryption.

QKD, championed heavily in Europe (and increasingly in China), takes a different route. Its security does not depend on mathematical difficulty at all; instead, it relies on the laws of physics, which hold regardless of how much computing power an attacker has. Díaz is clear that these are not competing bets so much as complementary layers of defense.

The real risk is inaction, as organizations that wait to see which approach “wins,” instead of starting a quantum-safe migration now on their most sensitive and confidential networks, risk exposing their most confidential data.

From Six People to a 55-Person Deep-tech Company

Luxquanta was founded in May 2021 as a spin-off of ICFO, the photonics research institute in Barcelona, built on technology its co-founders had already developed through European research projects and validated with telecom operators. Díaz joined four months later, after 11 years at Corning, the American fiber-optics company where she led market development across Europe and parts of Africa.

She later grew into the CEO role alongside a deeply technical founding team.

The company closed its first year with six employees. Today, it has grown to around 55, spanning 17 nationalities, and has shipped multiple product generations worldwide, with the first system delivered to Telefónica.

Getting Funded in Spain

Hardware is capital-intensive in a way software rarely is, and Luxquanta’s funding path reflects that. The early rounds came from corporate investors who understood the market directly, such as Corning and GTD, a Catalan company known for mission-critical software (the kind that, as Díaz puts it, “goes on rockets”).

From there, the company built an EU-funded consortium project named QUARTER, alongside sister company Quside (also born from ICFO) and Telefónica, among others. The QUARTER project was worth close to €9M in total, of which Luxquanta received roughly €2.5M as project coordinator. As a continuation of Luxquanta’s involvement in EuroQCI initiatives, the company is now leading QUARTERNEXT, which brings together key players such as Quside, fragmentiX, Chilas, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, and Telefónica to advance QKD standardization.

Last year, Luxquanta closed an €8M Series A funding round that brought in a broader mix of backers: Telefónica (through Wayra), GMV, and two investment funds: Big Sur as lead investor and A&G as its strongest backer, alongside institutional money from the European Investment Council.

Alongside the funding, the company has been generating commercial revenue for three years and is now selling a second-generation product across Europe and beyond.

Europe Sovereignty in Integrated Photonics

Luxquanta’s CV-QKD technology holds the potential to be developed into a fully integrated photonic chip. However, chip manufacturing is, in Díaz’s words, “hard.” Printing a photonic circuit means translating a design onto a substrate at a specialized foundry, at a cost that runs into the hundreds of thousands of euros per iteration, with no guarantee that the result will work as intended. Today, that fabrication largely happens outside Europe, including in Taiwan.

Building that capability in Europe is both a technical and a strategic challenge. The EU has made clear it wants “technological sovereignty” in quantum technologies, built in Europe and not dependent on external supply chains. Luxquanta is involved in European projects working specifically toward local photonic chip fabrication.

Spanish Quantum Alliance (SQuA).

Díaz is candid that Spain isn’t a pioneer in artificial intelligence. But she argues the country, and Europe more broadly, is much better positioned in quantum technologies, an industry she breaks into three pillars: sensing, computing, and communications/cryptography, the most mature of the three.

Spain has real depth across all three: strength in sensing concentrated in the Basque Country, and companies including Luxquanta and Quside in communications, with Qilimanjaro leading in quantum computing. That ecosystem gave rise to the Spanish Quantum Alliance (SQuA), an industry association that Díaz currently chairs, which works to coordinate the national ecosystem and engage directly with government, including recent discussions with Spain’s Secretary of State for Digitalization and AI, Óscar López.

At a European level, she argues Europe has “all the cards” to lead the commercialization of quantum technologies globally, provided it can translate research into industrial scale quickly enough.

A Seat at NATO’s Transatlantic Quantum Community (TQC)

Luxquanta has recently joined the NATO Transatlantic Quantum Community (TQC), a working group focused specifically on quantum technologies. The goal of that group is to get NATO allies to formally recognize and evaluate quantum-safe technologies like QKD as part of their collective security roadmap.

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Vanesa Díaz is the CEO of Luxquanta, where she is leading the company’s growth as a pioneer in quantum-safe communications and Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). Under her leadership, Luxquanta has successfully transitioned from deep-tech innovation to commercial scale, securing Series A funding and driving the deployment of CV-QKD solutions across telecom networks, NRENs, and government infrastructures globally. With over 20 years of experience in the telecommunications industry, including senior international roles at Corning Optical Communications, Vanesa combines deep technical expertise with strategic leadership, focusing on making quantum security deployable, scalable, and operational in real-world networks.