Luxquanta and three fellow small and mid sized enterprises (Quside, Chilas, fragmentiX) lead the EU's European Quantum Communication Infrastructure (EuroQCI) quantum communications infrastructure programme alongside infrastructure partner
The EU's quantum-safe communications buildout has a named bottleneck, and four European companies just signed up to fix it in four years. QUARTERNEXT, a four-year, IRIS²-funded consortium that launched July 6, 2026, is built around a specific premise: industrial certification, not physics, is the next milestone.
Coordinator Luxquanta, a Madrid-based continuous-variable quantum key distribution hardware developer, is leading the project alongside three fellow small and mid-sized enterprises, plus two infrastructure partners. Quside (Spain) contributes high-performance quantum random number generators, Chilas (Netherlands) supplies narrow-linewidth lasers and photonic integrated components, and fragmentiX (Austria) brings information-theoretic secret-sharing appliances. Telefónica, the Spanish telecom carrier, and the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology round out the partnership, with Telefónica's role signalling that QUARTERNEXT is meant to plug into existing operator networks, not live in a research lab. Chilas, one of the SME partners, also posted its own release confirming the same launch, scope, and timeline.
Earlier European programmes validated the physics. The Horizon 2020 OPENQKD testbed confirmed that quantum key distribution works on real fiber. The European Commission's EuroQCI policy page frames the next phase as a procurement and integration problem: member states need a pan-European quantum network running over terrestrial fiber and a secure space segment, not another demonstration. QUARTERNEXT is the supply-chain answer to that ask.
The project is financed under the Digital Europe Programme's IRIS² Quantum Communication Infrastructure call, the same instrument that backs the secure-connectivity pillar of the EU's planned IRIS² multi-orbit satellite constellation. The consortium does not publish a total award figure in the launch materials, and the secondary Quantum Computing Report write-up only restates the coordinator's release, so any monetary number would have to be pulled from the call fiche before being asserted.
Two technical choices in QUARTERNEXT's scope diverge from earlier EuroQCI work. The first is a deliberate move toward continuous-variable QKD, which encodes keys on the phase and amplitude of laser light rather than on single photons. Continuous-variable QKD is widely seen as more compatible with telecom-grade components and with coexistence on the same fiber as classical optical traffic, what an operator like Telefónica would need to actually deploy it. The second is a vocabulary shift in how the consortium describes its own output: every public artifact from the launch uses "certifiable, industrial-grade" as the headline deliverable, the language of procurement specifications and operator acceptance criteria, not of laboratory benchmarks. The launch materials do not name a certifying body (ETSI, BSI, ENISA, or a national scheme are not cited in the available sources), and "certifiable" is a program target rather than a guaranteed outcome.
Continuous-variable QKD hardware, narrow-linewidth lasers, quantum random number generators, and information-theoretic secret-sharing are all categories where Europe is trying to build domestic suppliers before pan-EU deployment locks in non-EU vendors. For the four SMEs, QUARTERNEXT gives each one a four-year runway, a public-sector reference customer in Telefónica, and a shared standards conversation that is harder to assemble outside a funded consortium.
The next concrete markers to watch are the certification milestones: which scheme the consortium commits its hardware to, which independent test house runs the first audits, and when the first operator-grade device exits the program. The consortium's published timeline ends in 2030, four years from the July 6, 2026 launch.