iscover
Australian quantum sensing company Deteqt has closed a $5 million seed funding round on the back of renewed international interest in the use of quantum magnetometry devices for sensing during a recent US military rescue operation in Iran.
During that successful pilot rescue mission, a “Ghost Murmur” location device was reportedly used to detect a human heartbeat from a distance via magnetic signature.
In Australia, Deteqt is building one of the world’s most compact quantum magnetic sensors, with the funding used to advance a field-ready product, scale a diamond chip manufacturing and grow the team.
The company’s lead application is global positioning system-denied navigation for defence platforms, where jamming in contested environments has created urgent, immediate demand for alternative positioning technology.
The funding round was led by Main Sequence, with participation from ATP Fund, BOKA Capital, Beaten Zone Venture Partners, Uniseed, and the University of Sydney.
“Magnetic fields permeate everything around us – every object, every geological formation, every living body,” Deteqt co-founder and chief executive Dr Jim Rabeau said.
“When we have been able to access these signals at all, the results have been profound – MRI, mineral exploration, brain imaging. But these are isolated breakthroughs, built on systems too large and expensive to deploy beyond a handful of controlled environments. Our chip-scale integration changes that entirely.
“We are bringing that same sensitivity into completely new environments and form factors, and when you can do that at scale, you unlock an entire layer of intelligence about the physical world – not just measuring it, but making it usable for machines to navigate, interpret and act on in real time.”
Deteqt’s chip-scale quantum magnetometer features an exquisitely sensitive sensor that combines a diamond crystal with a custom semiconductor chip, compact enough to be embedded in drones, autonomous vehicles, robots and far beyond.
The chip-scale form factor is what makes Deteqt unique and enables ubiquitous deployment: quantum-grade magnetic sensing manufactured using standard semiconductor processes, deployable wherever it’s needed.
“Deteqt is tackling one of the hardest problems in quantum technology: building sensors that are simultaneously sensitive enough to be useful and small enough to deploy at scale,” said Alejandra Romero, investment manager at Main Sequence.
“What sets Deteqt apart is the combination of a chip-scale manufacturing path and the commercial traction they’ve built in less than 18 months. The partner pipeline and the speed of execution are exceptional for a company at this stage.”
Robert Dougherty
Want to see more stories from trusted news sources?
Make Defence Connect a preferred news source on Google.
Click here to add Defence Connect as a preferred news source.
