Quantum Security, Quantum Networking

Arqit invests in Sirius to build quantum-safe networks for NATO

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October 20, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Arqit is investing in Sirius Computer to bolster quantum-safe communications for defense organizations and critical infrastructure. The move builds on an existing partnership and will accelerate development of Crux, a software platform designed to run on commercial devices and integrate with existing networks.

This allows users to extend secure communications without replacing current systems, with applications including control systems for Uncrewed Autonomous Vehicles. The companies have also been selected by NATO as part of a consortium to provide secure networking services; Paul Feenan, General Manager for Defence & Government at Arqit, states that security needs to support that cooperation without adding complexity for personnel on the ground.

Arqit Investment Strengthens Sirius’s Quantum-Safe Network Solutions

This capability distinguishes the platform from solutions requiring specialized hardware, lowering the barrier to adoption for organizations seeking to upgrade their security protocols. Crux integrates Sirius’s secure networking technology with Arqit’s Sovereign Key Platform (SKP) and NetworkSecure adaptors, protecting sensitive communications across diverse networks and devices. The investment directly supports a collaborative effort recently selected by NATO to provide secure networking services, demonstrating a high-profile application of the technology within a major international organization.

Jason Van der Schyff, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sirius, stated that they’ve built Sirius around the belief that secure communications shouldn’t depend on complex, expensive infrastructure that is difficult to deploy and maintain. This philosophy, combined with Arqit’s encryption solutions, aims to deliver adaptable and easily deployed security for defence and government users.

The partnership will also pursue opportunities with the UK Ministry of Defence and the US Department of Defense, expanding the reach of their joint offerings, Sirius says. Beyond traditional networks, the companies are focusing on securing emerging technologies, specifically Uncrewed Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs) and their control systems. This application highlights the platform’s relevance to rapidly evolving defence technologies and the need to protect critical infrastructure from quantum computing-based attacks.

We’ve built Sirius around the belief that secure communications shouldn’t depend on complex, expensive infrastructure that is difficult to deploy and maintain.

Jason Van der Schyff, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sirius
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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