Quarkitech has also been awarded a ₹1.5 crore grant by IITM-CDOT Samgnya Technologies Foundation, under the National Quantum Mission.

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Andrii Yalanskyi

Quarkitech, a deeptech company from the 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 will deploy the funds to develop a core compression algorithm library, designed to reduce sensor data at the source, before it is stored, processed, or transmitted.Quarkitech is building solutions that help drones, satellites and other defense utilities to store more sensor data by compressing it 10-100 times. This allows platforms to move more usable data through the same bandwidth and power constraints without additional hardware or communication infrastructureThe company has also been awarded a ₹1.5 crore grant by IITM-CDOT Samgnya Technologies Foundation, under the National Quantum Mission.“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.“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.In laboratory testing, Quarkitech reports a 26X reduction in data volume while retaining 98 per cent of mission-critical information, measured on drone captured images. The company is now working towards validating these results under real-world operating conditions, including moving platforms and in environments with heat, vibration, limited onboard power, and intermittent connectivity.Published on August 12, 2026