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There’s a clock ticking in cybersecurity that most people can’t hear yet. Sometime around 2029, possibly sooner, quantum computers may reach the point where they can crack the encryption protecting everything from banking systems to government secrets. The industry calls this moment “Q-Day.” QIZ Security just raised $17 million to make sure enterprises are ready for it.
The New York-based startup closed a seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, with participation from Evolution Equity Partners, Qbeat Ventures, Singtel Innov8, and Qino Cyber Capital. The funding, announced on July 9, will go toward product development and expanding the company’s cryptographic posture management platform.
Why crypto investors should care about cryptography
Let’s be clear upfront: QIZ Security has nothing to do with crypto tokens or blockchain. No token launch, no DeFi protocol, no Web3 play. But here’s the thing. The “crypto” in cryptocurrency literally refers to the same cryptographic foundations that QIZ is racing to fortify. And if quantum computers break RSA or elliptic curve cryptography, the implications for blockchain security would be nothing short of catastrophic.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and virtually every major blockchain relies on the same public-key cryptography that quantum computers threaten to unravel. A sufficiently powerful quantum machine could theoretically derive private keys from public keys, meaning every wallet with a visible public key becomes a sitting duck.
What QIZ actually does
QIZ Security’s platform is designed to detect, evaluate, remediate, and manage cryptographic assets across both on-premises and cloud environments. In English: it scans an organization’s entire tech stack to find every instance of encryption, figures out which ones are vulnerable to quantum attacks, and helps migrate to quantum-resistant alternatives.
The company’s CEO, Ben Volkow, has emphasized automated compliance and risk prioritization as core features of the platform. Rather than forcing security teams to manually audit thousands of cryptographic implementations, QIZ aims to automate that process and rank vulnerabilities by severity.
One threat the platform specifically targets is the “harvest now, decrypt later” attack vector. This is where adversaries, often state-sponsored, intercept and store encrypted data today with the expectation that quantum computers will let them decrypt it in the future.
QIZ claims over six years of PQC field experience and partnerships with more than 100 organizations. In May 2026, the company announced a strategic collaboration with Google Cloud to provide unified visibility and support for enterprises transitioning to quantum-resistant cryptography solutions.
The quantum threat to digital assets
Bitcoin’s security model relies on the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), which quantum algorithms like Shor’s algorithm could theoretically break. Ethereum faces similar exposure. Both networks would need to implement hard forks to adopt quantum-resistant signature schemes.
Some newer blockchain projects have begun integrating lattice-based or hash-based cryptography, which are considered quantum-resistant. But the vast majority of value in crypto still sits on chains that haven’t made this transition. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been working on standardizing PQC algorithms, and the urgency of enterprise adoption is exactly what companies like QIZ are capitalizing on.
Founded in 2025, QIZ Security is still early-stage. But in a market where the cost of being late to quantum readiness could be measured in trillions of dollars of compromised assets, early-stage might be exactly the right time to be building.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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