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. “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. 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.