How did Singaporean brothers Lim Meng Liang and Ken Lin turn Lim’s expertise in supposedly unsolvable Diophantine equations and his 2022 US patent into Aires Applied Quantum Technology, what is the company’s LionGuard encryption product and how does it protect files from quantum

Lim Meng Liang and his older brother Ken Lin turned a mathematical-security idea into Aires Applied Quantum Technology in 2023: Lim supplied the applied-mathematics research and patented cryptographic method, while Ken left a 15-year finance career to commercialise it. Their bet is that a software product built around difficult Diophantine-equation-based key generation can help organisations prepare for future cryptanalytically relevant quantum computers.

• From research to company. Lim, an NUS applied-mathematics alumnus, worked on Diophantine equations—integer-solution problems that can be extraordinarily difficult and, in some cases, undecidable. His U.S. patent, US 11,522,674 B1, granted on December 6, 2022, is titled “Encryption, decryption, and key generation apparatus and method involving Diophantine equation and artificial intelligence”; it names Lim as inventor and Aires Investment Holdings as assignee. The brothers then spent about three years developing LionGuard under Aires; Lim retained his investment business, while Ken gave up his senior private-bank product and investment-advisory role to build the start-up.

• What LionGuard is. LionGuard is a subscription file-encryption application for files held on a device, in cloud storage, or across networks. The sender generates an encryption key and sends it to the intended recipient through the app; the recipient needs LionGuard to decrypt the protected file. Aires presents the product as combining its proprietary Diophantine-based approach with established cryptographic components; its Microsoft listing specifically describes AES-256 encryption.

• How the quantum-security claim should be read. The intended defence is against “harvest now, decrypt later”: adversaries can steal encrypted data today and attempt to break conventional public-key cryptography when capable quantum machines arrive. Aires says its problem-based key-generation method is resistant to such attacks because solving the underlying equations is infeasible, including for quantum computers. But “unbreakable” is a company/media characterisation, not an independently established security guarantee: a patent proves novelty claims were granted, not that a scheme has received the extensive public cryptanalysis, standardisation, implementation review, and independent security validation normally expected for high-assurance cryptography. Existing reported details are insufficient to verify that level of validation.

• Commercial status and price. As reported in June 2026, LionGuard was in beta with more than 100 subscribers, including enterprise users in oil and gas, commodities trading, ed-tech, cloud services, and banking/financial services. The published price was S$388 per user per month; Aires said it intended to lower the fee to reach SMEs, including law and accounting firms, F&B chains, family offices, and larger data-sensitive businesses.

• Intellectual property and adjacent applications. Aires reports holding four international patents for advanced data encryption. Beyond file encryption, it is piloting encryption for 2D codes—barcodes and QR codes—in Europe, aimed at payments, logistics, supply-chain authentication, and product tagging.

• Funding and expansion. The company had secured more than US$2 million from private investors and local agencies including Enterprise Singapore. It was seeking a listing in the U.S., Singapore, or Japan to raise an eight-digit sum for international marketing and growth. It had eight staff in MacPherson at the time of reporting.

• Singapore context. Aires is part of a broader domestic push from quantum research toward commercial applications—especially quantum-safe security. Singapore’s National Quantum Strategy commits about S$300 million over five years, atop more than S$400 million previously invested in quantum R&D, to develop talent, research, infrastructure and commercial capability. Aires is a comparatively asset-light, cybersecurity-focused entrant in that ecosystem: rather than building quantum-computing hardware, it is trying to package post-quantum-oriented protection into deployable software.

• Why the career leap matters. The brothers’ story is not merely a technical spin-out: it is an entrepreneurial response to a market that was initially immature. Ken recalled that in 2023 audiences confused “quantum cryptography” with cryptocurrency; by 2026, prospects were instead asking about integration, deployment schedules and long-term readiness. That change in customer conversation, plus the brothers’ willingness to leave established finance careers, explains why they chose to commercialise Lim’s patent rather than leave it as an academic or personal asset.