ColdQuanta lands additional $2.8M in defense grants

BOULDER  — A consortium of American defense agencies is giving ColdQuanta Inc. $2.8 million in grants and contracts to develop its cold-atom sensor systems.

The company announced Tuesday that it had received the funds from grants with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and with NASA. It also signed two contracts with a U.S. military branch worth $1.4 million.

ColdQuanta uses lasers to drop atoms to near-absolute zero temperatures. Those frozen atoms are useful for measuring physical forces such as gravity or the movement of time, and are the basis for quantum computing research.

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The grants come weeks after ColdQuanta was awarded $1 million by NASA for developing smaller versions of their atomic sensors for research use. This grant puts the company above $30 million in research and development funding over its lifetime.

Christopher Wood

Christopher Wood is editor and publisher of BizWest, a regional business journal covering Boulder, Broomfield, Larimer and Weld counties. Wood co-founded the Northern Colorado Business Report in 1995 and served as publisher of the Boulder County Business Report until the two publications were merged to form BizWest in 2014. From 1990 to 1995, Wood served as reporter and managing editor of the Denver Business Journal. He is a Marine Corps veteran and a graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder. He has won numerous awards from the Colorado Press Association, Society of Professional Journalists and the Alliance of Area Business Publishers.