Since Cerberus Ventures’ inception, we have talked to over a hundred quantum companies, and have made multiple investments in the space, all focused on the picks-and-shovels layer of the quantum ecosystem. We’ve gravitated towards foundational investments that seek to underpin the growth of the quantum space. Now, as the quantum ecosystem matures, startups and large companies alike are focused on developing technology and systems that will help quantum scale. Photon Queue is our latest investment in this area.
Quantum networking and many quantum computing architectures ultimately depend on one thing: the ability to precisely control and synchronize photons. Photons are ideal carriers of quantum information because they travel at the speed of light while preserving the fidelity of the information they carry. The challenge is that they are difficult to store and manipulate.
Quantum memories solve this issue by temporarily storing and subsequently synchronizing the delivery of photons. Today, most memories rely on either long lengths of optical fiber or matter-based approaches that convert photons into other physical states, such as atoms or molecules, for storage. These approaches often introduce loss and performance limitations.
Photon Queue, founded in 2024, is working to build the next generation of quantum memory hardware. Their technology solves a critical quantum computing bottleneck and offers a more effective alternative to fiber- and matter-based memories.
Why Photon Queue
Photon Queue has built a quantum memory technology that uses mirrors, optical switches, and beam splitters to precisely route and store photons for configurable time periods. By keeping the photons in the optical domain, Photon Queue avoids many of the tradeoffs associated with matter-based technologies. Photon Queue’s devices operate at room-temperature and in free-space, enabling high efficiency and bandwidth with low loss.
Photon Queue is developing enabling infrastructure that can benefit multiple quantum computing modalities, beginning with photonic and trapped-ion systems.
The Team
When we first met Nathan, Photon Queue's CEO, he was finishing his PhD in Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign while already serving the company's first customers. He and the team had built and shipped early systems before raising institutional capital, and Nathan was personally managing customer relationships while completing his research. That mix of scientific depth, scrappiness, and customer orientation stood out immediately.
One story captures that well: Nathan personally drove one of Photon Queue’s prototype systems from Illinois to Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and has continued to be a hands-on technical partner when issues arise. For us, that was more than a good founder anecdote. It reflected a team that is not just advancing frontier physics, but doing the hard, non-glamorous work required to turn research into products customers can readily use.
We have been equally impressed by Kelsey (CTO) and the broader Photon Queue team, who bring the same combination of technical rigor and grit. Nathan, Kelsey, and their teammates are taking a complicated piece of the quantum stack and making it practical, usable, and scalable. We are thrilled to partner with them as they work to build next generation infrastructure to advance quantum potential.
Photon Queue is currently hiring. You can learn more by visiting their website.
Suggested Reads
