EIC Accelerator Winner Q*Bird and the Quantum-Safe Network Race

In peer-to-peer quantum key distribution, each link joins two sites, and the partners in Q*Bird's first network describe such systems as less flexible. Q*Bird, a Delft spin-off of QuTech and TU Delft, sells a version in which many users plug into one central hub, and its hardware already carries keys at the Port of Rotterdam, between Belgium and Luxembourg, and between data centres in Dublin. The EIC Accelerator selected its project, NEXUS, at the March 2025 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant agreement signed on 7 November 2025 with an EU contribution of €2,490,161.63, running from 1 December 2025 to 30 November 2027.

The company has since changed its name. On 15 September 2026 it announced that Q*Bird had become Falqon Systems, with ownership, leadership and customer relationships unchanged, according to The Quantum Insider and Quantum Computing Report. CORDIS already lists the coordinator as Falqon Systems B.V., and North Data shows the same Chamber of Commerce number, 85254541, under the former name Q-Bird B.V.

How the hub design differs

Quantum key distribution (QKD) sends encryption keys as single photons, so that anyone measuring them in transit disturbs them and is detected. Measurement-device-independent QKD was proposed by Hoi-Kwong Lo, Marcos Curty and Bing Qi in Physical Review Letters in 2012 as a fix for attacks on the detectors, which the paper calls a long-standing problem. The users send photons to a middle station that makes the measurement, and the paper states that the scheme "removes all detector side channels".

Q*Bird's commercial argument follows from that geometry. The middle station becomes a shared hub that many users connect to, each with its own fibre, and the measurement happens at the hub. The InnovationQuarter case study of the Rotterdam network describes this multipoint-to-multipoint set-up and quotes the claim that Q*Bird is "the only entity in the world that offers this scalable system"; that claim is the company's and its partners', and no independent market survey confirming it could be found. The NEXUS objective in CORDIS presents the design as lowering the cost per user against point-to-point QKD.

Where the hardware runs

The Rotterdam network was the first. A test phase started at the end of 2022 with a central hub in Eurofiber's data centre and two end points, at Portbase and the Port of Rotterdam Authority, per InnovationQuarter and The Quantum Insider in May 2024. The consortium also included Single Quantum, Cisco, Intermax and InnovationQuarter.

In June 2025 Belnet, the Belgian research network, announced what it called the first cross-border MDI-QKD connection in the Benelux, built with Q*Bird hardware: a hub in Arlon, a 45 km link to the University of Luxembourg in Kirchberg and an extension to the European Space Agency site in Redu, for 132 km in total. Two of four planned end nodes were active at the time. In March 2026 the Walton Institute at SETU and Q*Bird announced Ireland's first multi-node MDI-QKD network, with four end nodes at Dublin City University, Trinity College Dublin and two Dublin data centres and a central hub at ASIERA, the national research network, under the €10 million IrelandQCI project, per The Quantum Insider and Irish Tech News.

The company also names a Madrid metropolitan network run with Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and the Eurofiber QUEST project across Dutch data centres, and lists deployments in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland, Austria and Spain. Its website goes further, claiming more than 1,419 km of quantum network, more than 50 network devices deployed and operations in seven or more countries, and it shows logos of firms including ABN Amro, Nokia and Cisco without describing the relationships. These figures are the company's own and could not be checked against an outside source.

The money

Q*Bird raised €2.5 million in May 2024 in a round led by QDNL Participations and Cottonwood Technology Fund with InnovationQuarter, per Tech.eu and The Quantum Insider; at the time it said it had a launch customer and three further contracts for quantum networks in Europe, none named. North Data lists a state aid grant of €399,060. In January 2026 the company announced its EIC package as €2.5 million in grant and €5 million in equity, per TU Delft Campus and The Quantum Insider. CORDIS records only the grant. No EIC Fund portfolio entry or closing date for the equity could be found, so whether it has been paid in is not public.

North Data lists filed balance sheets for 2022 to 2025, but their figures are not shown in the free view, so staff, revenue and losses could not be verified from the accounts.

What NEXUS promises

According to CORDIS and the company's announcement, NEXUS is meant to take the system from prototype to full commercialisation: smaller and more efficient hardware, new optical modules, dense deployments with many user nodes, an orchestration layer for networks that span several operators and domains, and more production capacity at lower cost. The project is eleven months into a 24-month schedule, and the CORDIS results page lists no report, deliverable or publication yet.

1. Multi-user MDI-QKD in the fieldExistsHub networks in Rotterdam, Arlon to Luxembourg and Dublin, per Belnet and partners, all before or at the start of NEXUS.
2. Multi-operator orchestrationProduct announcedKey Manager launched in June 2026, per Quantum Computing Report; Domain Controller named in the September 2026 rebrand; no independent test.
3. Smaller, cheaper hardwareNot yet shownNo new hardware generation, size or price figure published.
4. Larger production capacityNot yet shownNo production figures in public; CORDIS has no report.

Why the EU funds it

The NEXUS objective ties the project to the "harvest now, decrypt later" risk, in which encrypted data is stored today to be broken by a future quantum computer, and to EuroQCI. The Commission's EuroQCI programme, which all 27 member states have joined, is building terrestrial fibre networks and a space segment for quantum key exchange, with national projects funded under Digital Europe. The Irish network on Q*Bird hardware is described by The Quantum Insider as part of IrelandQCI, "a key contributor to EuroQCI", and the Belgian link was built for BeQCI with NextGenerationEU money, per Belnet. The company also lists, on its website, an October 2026 paper on EU dual-use controls for quantum technology.

The company is active: it renamed itself in September 2026 and lists events and publications through October 2026. The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.