Our

Story

Beginnings

QLM Technology started from an idea of Chief Technical Officer, Xiao Ai. Xiao's postgraduate research at the University of Bristol with Professor John Rarity had explored using high-power lasers and single-photon lidar to measure carbon dioxide gas from a satellite. After that project fell apart over issues with funding he realized that the same approach could be used more locally and at much lower cost to precisely measure the emissions of methane from gas wells and pipelines on the ground. A low-power lidar beam that simultaneously measured both the shape and the concentration of plumes of methane could tell exactly how much gas was being leaked - exactly the information gas operators needed to know. He tried to explain to funding agencies and existing gas detection experts how single-photon lidar could do this and was told what he was claiming was impossible. So, with the support of the newly formed Quantum Technology Enterprise Centre (QTEC) he founded QLM.

PROTOTYPES

At QTEC Xiao paired up with our Chief Executive Officer Murray Reed. Murray had spent over 30 years developing high-tech laser products in Silicon Valley and saw the potential of Xiao's approach and identified the know-how QLM needed to take it to market. QLM wrote new proposals that won awards from the Innovate UK's Quantum Technology initiative and won matching funding from angel investors. QLM expanded, and under the IUK SPLICE Project, formed a collaborative consortium of private and government technology developers including Bay Photonics and the Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult, as well as gas industry leaders including experts from the National Physical Laboratory, National Grid Gas and Ametek Land. The prototype lidar cameras we developed demonstrated our technology's potential at industrial trials across the world and helped secure the next level of funding with global oil and gas service leader SLB (formerly Schlumberger) as our strategic partner and channel into the global natural gas production and distribution industry.

Today

QLM is starting to change the way greenhouse gases are measured and understood. QLM's revolutionary new Quantum Gas Lidar is a unique, internationally-patented leak monitoring solution with outstanding performance and cost advantages over all other technologies. It enables accurate detection, localization and quantification of industrial methane emissions in an affordable, scalable way. You can't manage what you can't measure and QLM is on a mission to show the world how to measure and manage greenhouse gases.