Quarkitech shrinks sensor data before it ever leaves the drone
The Chennai-based company builds compression software that cuts the volume of data a sensor produces at the source, for platforms where bandwidth and power are limited.
A modern sensor produces more data than the platform carrying it can move. A drone with a hyperspectral camera or a satellite with a radar payload generates data faster than its link can transmit and faster than its onboard storage can absorb, and the gap widens every time sensors improve.
The usual answers are unsatisfying. Storing it for later download makes the information late. Discarding most of it risks losing the part that mattered. Compressing it is easy for a photograph, but hard for scientific data, where the fine detail is often the whole point. works on that third option. Founded in January 2025 and based at the IIT Madras Research Park, the company builds software that reduces sensor data at the source, before it is stored, processed or sent anywhere.
Its founders are Rajesh Narayanan, Sanyam Parashar and Shashikant Singh Kunwar, with Vishnu P.K. as a founding member leading the quantum algorithms work. The company describes its wider field as simulation and algorithmic solvers for large-scale optimisation, the kind of problems that come up in finance and scientific computing as well as in sensing.
Mathematics borrowed from physics
The approach comes from an unexpected direction. Sanyam Parashar, the CEO, has said the algorithms draw on the mathematical framework used in quantum many-body physics, the field concerned with describing systems of enormous numbers of interacting particles.
The connection is less strange than it sounds. Physicists working on those systems spent decades developing methods to represent something vast in a compact form without losing what matters, because the full description is computationally impossible. The same mathematics applies to a data stream.
Quarkitech says its algorithms compress sensor data by 10 to 100 times depending on the sensor. In laboratory tests on drone-captured imagery, it reports reducing data volume 26 times while retaining 98% of what it classifies as mission-critical information. That classification is the company's own, and the result comes from a laboratory test. A practical detail matters as much as the compression ratio: the software runs on ordinary processors and graphics chips, not specialised hardware. That means it can go onto computers already flying, rather than needing new hardware built around it.
Two crore, and a grant
In August 2026, the company raised Rs 2 crore in pre-seed funding from Artha Access, a programme of Artha Venture Fund II, and Finvolve. It separately received a Rs 1.5 crore grant from the IITM-CDOT Samgnya Technologies Foundation under the National Quantum Mission, the government programme approved in 2023 covering quantum computing, communication, sensing and materials.
The grant is non-dilutive, and the combined amount is going into building out the core compression library, hiring engineers, and testing the technology outside the laboratory.
That testing is the real work ahead. The company still has to find out whether the results hold up on a moving platform, in heat and vibration, on limited power, with an intermittent connection.
The applications it names span unmanned aircraft, satellite earth observation, surveillance, and radar and LiDAR mapping. In each case, the sensors are producing more data than the system can move.
No customer, contract or revenue figure is public, and the company is nineteen months old. What it has is a laboratory result, a funded runway and a problem that is not going to get smaller.
(This story has been researched and compiled using publicly available information.)