BTQ Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:BTQ) shares climbed 7.6% in premarket trading Monday after the quantum technology firm unveiled a $15 million strategic investment and development agreement with ICTK (KOSDAQ:456010), South Korea’s leading secure element chip manufacturer.
The collaboration centers on co-developing a Quantum Compute in Memory (QCIM) chip that integrates BTQ’s cryptographic acceleration technology and post-quantum cryptography directly at the silicon level. The deal includes a joint design and certification effort, BTQ’s equity investment in ICTK, and cost sharing plus preferential manufacturing capacity from ICTK.
The QCIM chip is aimed at high-security use cases such as digital asset wallets, mobile authentication, IoT endpoints, payment systems, and defense networks. Early performance goals target up to five times faster Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) throughput compared to existing secure hardware, and around one million digital signatures per second.
“This agreement puts quantum-safe security at the center of the global silicon ecosystem,” said Olivier Roussy Newton, CEO of BTQ. “By combining BTQ’s QCIM platform, powered by our CASH acceleration, with ICTK’s secure-element expertise, we give hardware makers a clear path to embed post-quantum protection at scale.”
The deal aligns with South Korea’s newly announced Quantum Defense Strategy, which prioritizes rapid deployment of quantum-secure technologies across critical infrastructure, defense, and financial sectors. ICTK’s role as the country’s top secure-element vendor provides both technical validation and a pathway to commercial scaling.
The companies plan to move toward mass production and certification, working with international standards bodies such as International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Early customer discussions are already in progress with integrators evaluating the PQC-enabled secure chips for future product rollouts.