Hardware-first post-quantum cryptography for the institutions that can't afford to wait

FOUNDING STORY

Built by security engineers who recognized the hardware gap before the standards existed

Robert Lindstrom spent nine years in security architecture roles at financial infrastructure firms in Chicago, the last four running cryptographic infrastructure for payment clearing operations tied to Fedwire and ACH settlement. In that position, starting in 2018, he tracked the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization process not as an academic exercise but as an operational planning problem: when NIST picks a finalist, institutions will need certified hardware on a 3–5 year procurement cycle. No certified hardware will exist until the standards finalize. The standards will not finalize for years. The gap is a problem that someone needs to solve in advance of the mandate.

He left in 2022 to start Cryptrig with a specific mandate: build the HSM that payment infrastructure needs for the post-quantum transition — CRYSTALS-Kyber-1024 and Dilithium-3 executing in FPGA fabric inside a physical boundary designed for FIPS 140-3 Level 3 from day one. Not a software library. Not a firmware update to an existing classical HSM. Purpose-built hardware, designed around the finalized algorithms before the finalization pressure removed all remaining flexibility in the architecture.

The NIST standards finalized in August 2024. The CQ1 was designed to those standards from the start. Financial institutions evaluating their post-quantum migration window are no longer blocked on hardware availability. Cryptrig is not a consulting firm and does not sell migration advisory services — we sell the physical hardware that executes the algorithms your migration depends on.