Quantum Corridor in Hammond secures $10M funding round
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Hammond-based Quantum Corridor Inc., a public-private partnership developing a high-speed fiber optic communications network, has closed on a $10 million Series A round of funding. The company says it plans to use the funding to fuel expansion of its network to southwest Indiana.
The funding was raised by eight family offices and individual tech investors, though specific details were not immediately provided.
“The confidence of our investors matches the enthusiasm of researchers, private industry and defense leadership, all of which will come together on this network to reach human breakthroughs we cannot even yet fathom,” Quantum Corridor CEO Tom Dakich said in a news release.
Quantum Corridor was founded in 2021 in partnership with the state of Indiana and is based out of the Digital Crossroads Data Center in Hammond.
The company’s current network runs along a 14-mile route from Hammond to the ORD10 Data Center in Chicago. Just over a year ago, Quantum Corridor celebrated a milestone by completing testing of the network that saw connectivity speeds 500 times faster than the blink of an eye.
The goal, according to Dakich, is to be able to connect businesses and researchers at academic institutions in a fast and secure way.
Quantum Corridor is looking to expand the network for more than 250 miles across the Indiana Toll Road in northern Indiana and ultimately south, to Purdue University, through Indianapolis down to Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division.
“What we’re trying to do is to make it such that researchers and universities and private enterprise are able to go and use the connectivity that’s there and the power that’s there in order to do the most advanced research in the world,” Dakich told Inside INdiana Business in October. “What the quantum corridor does is it changes the whole way that communications are made.”
The $10 million Series A round will be used toward the $140 million expansion effort, the company said.
As part of that effort, Quantum Corridor plans to build out what it is calling Quantum Commercialization Centers, which will serve as relay points to ensure transmission efficiency and also serve as mini data centers where customers, researchers and students can work.
“With a quantum safe environment, we are now ready to expand south toward the numerous world-class academic research institutions, financial and pharmaceutical giants and defense hubs that are ready to link onto Quantum Corridor to compute and network,” President and Chief Technology Officer Ryan Lafler said in the release.
Quantum Corridor was initially funded with a nearly $4 million grant from the first iteration of the state’s Regional Economic Acceleration and Development Initiative, or READI. The company closed on a $17 million seed round of funding in early 2023.