PQ News

PQShield raise $37m in Series B funding, TechCrunch, 20th June 2024

This investment, led by New-York-based Addition, with participation from Chevron Technology Ventures, Legal and General, and Braavos Capital, brings our new investors alongside Oxford Science Enterprises, to help PQShield meet the fast-growing market demand from the technology supply chain.

With the expected publication of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standards in the next few weeks, the story of PQC is reaching a significant inflexion point. NIST’s final standards are likely to be adopted by ISO, and further regulatory bodies are bound to follow. In addition, governments continue to apply directives, such as CSNA 2.0 (the NSA’s national security guidance) which mandates migration of all US critical systems from 2025.

The impact of this acceleration is that PQC is now a commercial imperative – particularly if critical data needs to be kept for any length of time. With the threat of harvest-now-decrypt-later, any organization that hasn’t already started planning the transition is already behind.

PQShield exists because of the threat quantum computers pose to our digital information. Founded in 2018, we’re a world-leading team of cryptography experts and engineers, and we’ve built a comprehensive product suite for use in both hardware and software deployments. Our solutions are already helping with the transition to quantum security. For example, our products are currently used in areas including:

• Secure boot and updating of devices
• HSMs (Hardware Security Modules) powering financial transactions
• Vehicle connectivity in the automotive space
• Military-grade communications systems 

What’s more, our customers include the likes of AMD, Microchip Technologies, Collins Aerospace, Lattice Semiconductor, Sumitomo Electric, Mirise, and many others.

As a team, we’ve deliberately positioned ourselves for the quantum era. Recent appointments such as Janssen Liston (Senior Sales Director – North America) joining us from Rambus and Johannes Lintzen (Global Business Development Director) who joins us from Cryptomathic, show that we’re strategically aligned for growth.

We believe our team are the experts in the field, with a key role in the story of post-quantum. We co-authored the NIST standards, and we continue to advise international players such as the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the White House, the European Parliament and the World Economic Forum (WEF).

This significant investment will help us to expand our commercial operations, coming as it does just as NIST are due to publish the final PQC standards.

We see this as the key milestone in a process that will drive the global transition to quantum-resistance, and as the wider market adopts quantum-safe cryptography, we’re confident that we can help the world stay one step ahead.

Todd Arfman of Addition said:

“As we approach the culmination of the NIST project, we expect newly-ratified standards to help drive rapid adoption of PQC across the technology supply chain. Led by an industry-leading team with decades of experience, PQShield has quickly established itself as a leading authority in post-quantum cryptography for hardware and software. We are excited to see the business continue to build on its existing commercial success and further enhance its efforts in protecting our digital future.”

PQShield CEO and founder, Ali El Kaafarani, continued:

“I’m immensely proud to lead our team in shaping the way our digital world is protected against the threats of tomorrow. It no longer matters when a quantum computer will arrive that can break current cryptography methods: the need for quantum-resistant encryption is here today, as governments and standards agencies push to protect our most sensitive data. 

“We’re already getting our technology into the hands of customers across the supply chain, and today’s funding will enable us to deliver real-world, post-quantum hardware and software upgrades to even more organizations as they move to comply with new global standards.

“It’s our responsibility to deliver security and privacy in an increasingly digital world. Every line of code we write, every mathematical problem we solve, and every interaction we make is focused on one specific goal: keeping us all one step ahead of the attackers.”