A Tucson company with a university behind it.
Post-Quantum Tek holds the exclusive license to a patented switch invented at the University of Arizona's Wyant College of Optical Sciences, and exists to turn it into hardware.
Team.
Nina Trasoff, Chief Executive Officer
A communications executive and former Tucson City Council member and Vice Mayor. Nine years as a reporter and anchor at KGUN-TV, then built the news office of the Arizona Health Sciences Center and founded Trasoff & Associates in 1988. Serves on the University of Arizona Dance Advisory Board and the Arthritis Center Board. Founding member of the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation Board and the Ballet Tucson Board.
Pierre-Alexandre Blanche, Founding Investigator
Co-inventor of the switch. Sixteen years at the University of Arizona's College of Optical Sciences, rising to Research Professor; a Fellow of Optica; lead author of the Nature paper on holographic telepresence; author of SPIE's Field Guide to Holography and editor of Optical Holography (Elsevier). Co-author of ProjecToR with Microsoft Research.
David Arond, Board Chair
Thirty years in broadcast journalism and production. Moscow bureau chief for PBS's Nightly Business Report, creator of the PBS series On the Internet, and producer of documentaries and corporate work for 3Com, Sprint, Intel, and IBM. Founded eVideo Creations in Tucson in 1990.
Pat Madea, Chief Administrative Officer
Thirty-five years in corporate training and documentation, including Manager of Global Training Services at Modular Mining Systems and pioneering mainframe-based training delivery across the Southern Pacific railroad.
Inventors on the patent: Pierre-Alexandre Blanche, Nasser Peyghambarian (Professor Emeritus of Optical Sciences, founder of NP Photonics and TIPD), and Brittany Lynn (now a physicist at Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific).
Origin.
The diffractive switch was invented in Nasser Peyghambarian's and Pierre-Alexandre Blanche's groups at the College of Optical Sciences between 2012 and 2017, with support from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation's Center for Integrated Access Networks, a Department of Energy SBIR, and Tech Launch Arizona's proof-of-concept program.
Tech Launch Arizona, the university's commercialization arm, formed Post-Quantum Tek in 2023 to carry the work out of the lab. The company holds the sole license to the patent family and works with the Wildcat Philanthropic Seed Fund, Arizona's Optics Valley community, and the Tucson photonics manufacturing base that grew up around the college.
What we are looking for.
An engineering partner
A MEMS fabrication partner for the phase-modulating mirror array and a systems partner to harden the switch: fiber arrays, control plane, enclosure.
A pilot network
A research network, national lab, or test facility where microsecond reconfiguration has immediate value and where we can measure the full system end to end.
A licensee
The patented method is not tied to one chip. The specification notes that a conventional mirror-tilt switch can run the holographic pattern too, at about 50 µs, so an incumbent optical switch maker could license the approach for its existing hardware.
Investors who read the papers
The energy case is real and we have shown exactly where it lives. We would rather be judged on the 12 microseconds we measured than on a multiplier we did not.
News.
22 Oct 2026
New website published, with the research dossier, the energy model, and the patent record it is built on.
12 May 2026
University of Arizona research powers new optical switching technology designed to reduce data center energy consumption, PR Newswire. Reprinted by Semiconductor Digest and Yahoo Finance.
7 Aug 2023
Tech Launch Arizona reports its second most inventive year on record, naming Post-Quantum Tek among the year's new startups.