£4 million in seed funding will help Photon Queue accelerate development of room-temperature quantum memory hardware for quantum computing and photonics.
Photon Queue is building a system that traps photons in a mirror-bounded loop via an optical switch, effectively holding light until separate quantum operations can be synchronized.
The main engineering hurdle is minimizing photon loss at every mirror or switch pass, a problem that compounds over repeated loops and can derail calculations.
Room-temperature operation is central to the pitch because it avoids cryogenics, vacuum systems and transduction, making the hardware easier to integrate into distributed quantum networks.
Less than two years after launch, Photon Queue says it has moved from lab work to commercial hardware with customers including Sandia and the University of Maryland, signaling early demand for quantum-memory infrastructure.