PRESS RELEASE

CryptoNext Security (CNS) who provides the next generation security software to protect data against the quantum threat, announced today that it has closed a pre-seed round of financing with a strategic public institute and a leading deep-tech venture capital.

Quantum computers are a cyber-security time bomb. Data can be already stored and will be decrypted once a powerful-enough quantum computer is available. The last announcement of Google on quantum supremacy is yet another major milestone towards building such large quantum computers. The trend is clear and organizations must start now to protect their infrastructure against the quantum threat. Based on 20 years of academic research, CryptoNext’s security software permits right now to circumvent the quantum threat.

Standardization for quantum-resistant technologies is intense and world-wide. In view of the quantum threat to security, the US Standard body NIST started in 2017 a process to renew current public-key standards with quantum-resistant algorithms. The reference algorithms will be published within 2022 and adopted by the US administration by 2024. The algorithms selected by NIST will likely become international standards. China has a similar process and reference quantum-resistant algorithms will be published in 2020. At the EU level, ETSI is playing a central role in the integration of new quantum-resistant algorithms into security protocols (such as VPN, …). CNS is very active in these processes by proposing algorithms to the NIST and Chinese competitions and contributing to ETSI.

Participating in the round are Quantonation (lead) and SATT Lutech (Technology Transfer Unit from Sorbonne University). This round of funding will be used to hire software engineers and support the first commercial deployments of CryptoNext Security’s quantum-resistant cryptographic library. The first customers currently testing the software come from secure messaging, blockchain and digital signature segments.

CryptoNext Security founders (Jean-Charles Faugère, CTO, Ludovic Perret, CEO, and Frédéric Urvoy de Portzamparc, COO) said, “Besides financing, the closing of this pre-seed materializes strategic alliances for CryptoNext Security. Quantonation is a leading investor in the area of deep physics and is currently building a strong and dynamic ecosystem around quantum computing. CryptoNext Security is a spin-off from Sorbonne University and INRIA. We are very glad that our institutes are now associated to CryptoNext Security via the investment of SATT Lutech.”

Olivier Tonneau, partner at Quantonation, said “At Quantonation, we are delighted to invest in a world-class team in terms of Post-Quantum cryptography. With new data encryption standards being defined and first clients being already deployed, we believe the market is huge and Cryptonext Security has the potential to become a world leader.”

SATT Lutech’s President, Jacques Pinget, said “Cryptonext is at the start of a great entrepreneurial adventure, at the beginning of future huge market needs. We are proud of being part of this pre-seed round, allowing years of public research to provide solutions to meet one of the biggest challenges of ICT industry.”

Lucas Ravaux – Deputy Director, Research and Innovation department, from Sorbonne University :
“Sorbonne University, Inria and CNRS are proudly supporting the take-off of one of their most talented and promising spin-off in deeptech. Cryptonext team, whose academic excellence has been widely recognized, is now ready to take a next step by tackling a great societal challenge: bringing security in a post-quantum world.”