SpeQtral is commercialising quantum communications to prepare the world for the quantum future. Think quantum space lasers, entanglement and military level secure communications. As part of our mission to transform the world's networks, we plan to launch a constellation of satellites to enable world-wide entanglement distribution. The earliest application of this was the highly secure delivery of encryption keys to facilitate secret communications.

The delivery of secret keys via quantum entanglement (or quantum key distribution, QKD) originates at a physical level, where light particles travel from one location to another and are detected by extremely sensitive detectors. However, once the light particles are exchanged and detected by the communicating parties, the extraction of the information that makes up the secret key is entirely reliant on software methods. In the QKD field, the necessary software to deliver the secret keys is known as the QKD software stack. From signal processing challenges (i.e. detection of correlation peaks in high-loss environments) to optimisation of security (i.e. implementation of error correction codes or privacy amplification) the QKD stack presents several challenges that need to be addressed in order to bring entanglement-based QKD from academic levels to commercial maturity.