Clifton-headquartered Duality Quantum Photonics was founded in 2020 and now employs 20 staff
Duality Quantum Photonics founders Alberto Politi (left) and Anthony Laing(Image: handout)
A Bristol company developing and prototyping technology capable of sending data at the speed of light has received a major funding boost. Duality Quantum Photonics secured the £500,000 finance package from Truro-based finance provider SWIG.
The Clifton-headquartered company, which was launched in 2020 by professor Anthony Laing with his friend and fellow PhD student and physics professor Alberto Politi, now employs 20 staff. Its customers include Microsoft, BT, the UK Atomic Energy Authority and a range of other SMEs and start-ups.
The funding was delivered in two halves: in August 2023 to fund the employment of two staff members – a business director and operations director – and to expand from shared to dedicated office space; and the second in July 2025, to hire senior staff including a vice president of chip and processor sales, continue research and development and provide working capital.
While silicon chips revolutionised micro-electronics in the 1970s and the evolution of algorithms and software development in the following decades, professor Laing, who attended Bristol University as a mature student, claims it’s no longer the best material for data movement.
“By modern standards, it’s incredibly slow,” he said. “The number of transistors per chip has doubled every two years, enabling devices to get smaller, more powerful and cheaper; but we’ve reached the point where it’s not physically possible to get more transistors into a silicon chip.”
The consequences of such patchy signal processing range from minor inconvenience – a video call losing sound or an online movie suddenly pixelating – to life-threatening decision-making in areas such as health and aviation.
Duality Quantum Photonics’s chips, which encode data into light to be processed in nanoseconds, are designed at the SquareWorks tech hub in Clifton and made at Southampton University. They are then brought back to Bristol for testing.
“The whole point of using light is that we can process information faster – not just 10 per cent faster, but hundreds of thousands of times faster – at the speed of light,” said Mr Laing.
“The journey we’re on is not risk-free; on the contrary, deep tech innovation comes with risk. We needed a partner willing to take that risk for the greater good SWIG Finance allowed us to innovate towards commercial technology, and increasing our cash runway gave us time to develop our ideas into products.”
SWIG Finance business manager Jim McLaren added: “It was great that SWIG was able to help Duality Quantum Photonics. I’m no expert, but from what I’ve read, the quantum technology industry has been placed as a key focus by the UK government for the future success of its economy, and it’s wonderful to see a Bristol-based company at the forefront of making this happen.
“Anthony, Alberto and the team were a pleasure to work with to get this funding in place, and the success which I’m sure will continue to come to them is well-deserved.”
