Chennai: Quarkitech, a deeptech company based out of IIT Madras Research Park, has raised ₹2 crore in pre-seed funding from Artha Access, a programme of Artha Venture Fund II, and Finvolve to develop its proprietary data compression technology for defence, aerospace and other data-intensive applications.
The company has also been awarded a ₹1.5 crore grant by IITM-CDOT Samgnya Technologies Foundation under the National Quantum Mission, the national programme approved by the Union Cabinet in 2023.
The latest funding will be used to develop Quarkitech’s core compression algorithm library, which is designed to reduce sensor data at the source, before it is stored, processed or transmitted.
As India expands its drone, satellite and defence capabilities, onboard sensors such as radar, LiDAR and hyperspectral imagers are generating increasing volumes of data.
Platforms may not be able to continuously store or transmit this data, particularly when operating in remote environments without a live connection to a ground station. This creates a trade-off between data volume, quality, transmission speed and cost.
Quarkitech Develops Data Compression Technology for Defence and Space
Quarkitech addresses the data bottleneck at the point of capture. Its algorithms can compress sensor data by 10 to 100 times, depending on the sensor type, while retaining information relevant to the mission.
The technology is designed to allow platforms to move more usable data through existing bandwidth and power constraints without requiring additional hardware or communication infrastructure.
The company’s product is a software library that runs on a platform’s existing onboard compute. It includes separate tuning for radar, LiDAR, hyperspectral and electro-optical data streams.
This allows the same approach to be deployed across applications such as UAV downlinks, satellite payloads and ground-segment archives.
Quarkitech uses tensor networks, mathematical frameworks originally developed to model complex quantum systems, to identify and remove redundancy in high-volume sensor data.
“By applying the mathematical frameworks used to model complex quantum systems, we are untangling the massive data bottlenecks of modern defence and aerospace,” said Shashikant Singh Kunwar, Co-founder and CTO of Quarkitech.
“We are translating the theoretical power of tensor networks into an immediate, real-world tactical advantage.”
Quarkitech Reports 26X Data Reduction in Laboratory Testing
In laboratory testing, Quarkitech reports a 26X reduction in data volume while retaining 98% of mission-critical information. The results were measured on images captured by drones.
The company is now working to validate these results under real-world operating conditions, including moving platforms and environments involving heat, vibration, limited onboard power and intermittent connectivity.
The technology is aimed at operators whose sensors generate more data than their communication links can carry.
These include UAV and surveillance platforms, satellite earth-observation payloads, radar and LiDAR mapping fleets, as well as ground segments responsible for storing and processing incoming data.
According to the company, the same compression approach can also be extended to other bandwidth-constrained environments across communications and infrastructure.
Artha Access Invests in Quarkitech
Artha invested in Quarkitech through Artha Access, a pre-seed programme under Artha Venture Fund II. The programme co-invests alongside academic incubators and accelerators that have already backed a company, on terms set by the partner institution.
“Sensor redundancy is a physics problem before it is a software problem, and Quarkitech is attacking it at the point of capture instead of after the data is already stuck onboard.
What they have today is a laboratory result, and the honest question is whether it survives heat, vibration and a moving platform. We would rather be on the cap table while that question is being answered, which is exactly what Artha Access is built for,” said Anirudh A. Damani, Director, Artha Group.
Quarkitech Targets Live Defence and Space Deployments
The company’s next phase will focus on demonstrating that its technology can operate outside laboratory conditions and on live defence and space platforms.
Quarkitech is already in discussions with private defence and space operators for pilot deployments on live systems. Over the coming year, the company plans to undertake a limited number of pilot integrations with platform manufacturers, operators and research institutions.
The company’s technology is intended to address data bottlenecks across defence and aerospace applications where sensor-generated data exceeds available bandwidth, storage or power capacity.
Ashish Bhatia, Co-founder of Finvolve, said, “Classical computing has scaled remarkably, but it is now hitting hard limits on cost, energy and latency, and a lot of the problems India needs solved sit exactly at that wall.
Quarkitech is building quantum-inspired algorithms that work on today’s hardware, starting with the data bottleneck in defence and space and extending to a much wider class of optimisation problems across communications and infrastructure.
Backing a team out of IIT Madras Research Park at pre-seed is a bet on whether rigorous research survives contact with real systems, and this is a team built to answer that question.”
For Quarkitech, the focus in the next phase is to prove that its compression technology can hold up outside the lab and under real-world conditions on defence and space platforms.
The company is taking on a limited number of pilot integrations with platform manufacturers, operators and research institutions over the coming year.
