The Sword of Durandal – the wholly impossible “Quantum Navigation Device”

Because a large part of my job is finding interesting news to share, I spend a lot of time browsing various tech websites, blogs, YouTube channels, and crowdfunding sites. It was during one of those research sessions that I stumbled across a “revolutionary new quantum navigation device” on Indiegogo. Anything with ‘quantum’ in the name instantly makes me suspicious, so I dug deeper and found rabbit trail more meandering than a walk home from the bar on Friday night.

I should say that “quantum navigation” is a real thing. The term actually describes a few different related technologies, but they’re all part of cutting-edge research that has only gained traction in the past couple of years – the kind of thing being funded by organizations like DARPA. Existing quantum navigation system are prototypes that have just recently entered early real-world testing.

The First Red Flags

Knowing what real quantum navigation tech looks like, this device, strangely named “The Sword of Durandal”, sure looks ambitious. Only renders exist, but it will supposedly look a lot like existing handheld GPS devices. Somehow, this compact device will contain all of the fancy quantum tech necessary for navigation, the batteries to power that tech, and a nice full-colour display.

For comparison, consider Ironstone Opal, which is “a compact yet powerful quantum navigation system” prototype being built by Q-CTRL – a legitimate company and a leader in this field. Their single colinear Q-CTRL scalar quantum magnetometer alone is too large to fit in The Sword of Durandal’s enclosure. And that is just one small part of the complete system, which is much, much larger.

A diagram claims that The Sword of Durandal contains an atomic clock, an atom chip interferometer, a micro vacuum chamber and pump, and a VCSEL (Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser). How those work to achieve quantum navigation is anyone’s guess.

The video on the campaign page doesn’t help clarify anything. It bears all of the hallmarks of AI, and consists entirely of tech buzzwords combined with a peculiar level of fear-mongering.

Any reasonable person would be skeptical at this point. But what if there is some scientific genius behind the scenes with a major quantum breakthrough?

Introducing Dr Guido Demedici

The Indiegogo page lists Dr Guido Demedici as the project creator, so let’s take a look at his story. The exact formatting of his name varies, so I’ll stick with how I initially saw it on Indiegogo. The man has many different websites (most of which don’t work) and social media accounts. On each of those, he describes himself in a different way.

On guido-de-medici.org, he claims to be part of Italy’s famous Medici family. He references that many times across the internet in an apparent attempt at legitimacy by association. He even devotes that site’s sole working page to a brief summary of Medici history copied wholesale from themedicifamily.com, a site with which he seems to be unaffiliated.

In fact, there isn’t any evidence that Dr Guido Demedici has a connection to the Medici family or any other Medici family.

Still, a person’s ancestry doesn’t define them. So, let’s dig further to find out what the man himself has accomplished. His LinkedIn page describes him as:

Investor in Companies. Geo-Physicist. Chartered Professional Engineer. Investment Focus: REE mining, IT+AI, quantum computing, space, defence. Join 172,000+ newsletter subscribers – sign up: [email protected]

The about section on the LinkedIn page further makes the claim:

I have more than 28 years if experience in the venture and founder sector. Total value: 4.2 billion USD… My current company, Samarium Group, has managed to increase its net assets from zero more than 12 billion USD – within less than 3 years.

We’ll come back to the Samarium Group. First, let’s verify the man’s credentials. He claims to be a Doctor of Philosophy with an engineering PhD from Austria’s Universität Innsbruck, which he says he attended from September of 1986 to October of 1993. Searching on Google Scholar, I can’t find any mention of a relevant Guido Demedici. In Italian, “de” simply means “of” or “from” when found in a surname. But even searching variations and “Medici” alone doesn’t yield anything.

It seems odd to me that a physicist working on groundbreaking quantum tech hasn’t published a single paper. Interestingly, he does have a handful of repositories on his GitHub page, and the ones that have actual content within are related to crypto (this is foreshadowing).

That said, his YouTube channel does show him “in the quantum lab” in a video from April of 2025, with Google’s Sycamore quantum computer in the background (the audio seems to be missing):

But Dr Guido Demedici is also a working renaissance man: according to his Fiverr profile,  he used to offer information security services to anyone with at least $980 to spare. He has reviews there from as recently as a year ago. Those reviews are all five stars and come from a total of three clients, located in Bulgaria, Pakistan, and Nigeria, respectively.

To find out why he needs the money, it only makes sense for us to take a look at his companies to see what they’re all about.

Samarium Group

According to its website, Samarium Group is a multinational corporation with locations in Canada, Switzerland, the United States, and India. It works in sectors from robotics to e-commerce and data science to quantum computing security.

That’s pretty incredible for a company that only lists two employees on LinkedIn: Dr Guido DeMedici (CEO) and Jennifer DeMedici (Director).

What does the Samarium Group do? Well, your guess is as good as mine. The samarium.group website, which has some neat early ‘00s-inspired web design, is very vague. Most of it seems related to investment and acquisitions. And Dr Guido DeMedici himself has posted on several social networks that they’re looking to make more acquisitions – but only of entities pulling in at least $1M in annual earnings.

Samarium Group uses lots of buzzwords that are popular in the world of venture capital, including “AI” and “quantum.” But for a company working with such vast sums of money, they don’t list a single acquisition or investment. They helpfully provide their CIK (Central Index Key) for the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) in the United States, but that number – 0002074139 – doesn’t return any filings results from the SEC’s EDGAR (the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system).

In addition to The Sword of Durandal, Samarium Group list another project: The CAL SHALOUD NET.

CAL SHALOUD NET is supposed to be some sort of quantum replacement for the internet. As you would expect, it works “by taking advantage of quantum physics effects.” If that sounds farfetched, consider this quote:

The underlying scientific basis has been awarded in the year 2022 the Nobel Prize for Physics.

The emphasis there is mine, because if you check the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2022, you’ll see that it was awarded jointly to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for their experiments with entangled photons. Fascinating stuff, but only tangentially related to whatever might hypothetically drive The CAL SHALOUD NET.

But Samarium Group isn’t Dr Guido Demedici’s only company. At this point, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the man was also in the crypto game.

The House of Medici LLC

The House of Medici LLC, sometimes referred to as The House of Medici Corp, is the cryptocurrency arm of Dr Guido Demedici’s organization. LinkedIn lists three people in the company: Dr Guido Demedici, Danielle Medici, and Steve Galvez.

As far as I can tell, Steve Galvez doesn’t have any real involvement in any of this. He’s a designer, and he might have created some of the visual assets for The House of Medici LLC – probably as a freelancer. My initial assumption was that Danielle Medici is Dr Guido Demedici’s daughter and Jennifer is his wife… however, the photo used for Jennifer’s LinkedIn page is actually that of a fashion model whose photo appeared on a Polish retail website.

Danielle, meanwhile, seems to be a very real person, but I don’t believe she even knew about this. She doesn’t list The House of Medici LLC on her own LinkedIn page. My best guess is that Demedici simply saw an attractive young woman with the Medici name and added her to his company, though Danielle hasn’t responded to my request for comments.

The House of Medici LLC appears to be your typical cryptocurrency mill. They’ve launched crypto coins and tokens, along with NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens). None of those saw any adoption or success. According to Etherscan, one of them, called Samarium Group Common Shares, only had a single transfer: 100 trillion to House of Medici Corporation.

But things get much, much more interesting when you pull that thread. While researching those cryptocurrencies, I came across an OSC (Ontario Securities Commission) Bulletin issued on February 8th, 2018.

The bulletin names Volkmar Guido Hable, and alleges that Hable committed securities violations related to his work as the Executive Vice President of Mining and Exploration of Samaranta. The same bulletin states that:

On February 18, 2013, Samarium Group Holding (Samarium), submitted a letter to Samaranta indicating it was going to make a take-over bid for at least 51% of Samaranta’s shares at $0.12 per share. The letter was signed by Hable, and listed Hable as one of Samarium’s directors.

For those who care to give it a read, the bulletin also describes many other financial and corporate shenanigans. Including a false registration of Samarium Group (Holding) Pte. Ltd. as an entity incorporated in Singapore.

This leads to an obvious question: who is Volkmar Guido Hable?

Volkmar Guido Hable is Dr Guido Demedici. They are the same man, but with very different backgrounds and facial hair decisions. He never claimed any Medici ancestry when he was still using the Hable name, at least in any record I can find.

There are numerous chains of evidence proving that Hable and Demedici are one and the same, including that “Dr. Guido De’Medici” on Instagram still has the handle volkmar_therock. You can also see that they’re the same man if you look on YouTube, rather than at the stock image on Demedici’s LinkedIn page.

If that weren’t enough, The British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC) published an alert back in 2018 notifying the public that Hable was using the name DeMedici and telling people he was the founder of DeMedici Capital Partners. At that time, they said he had changed his name to Jacob Jason Volkmar Guido DeMedici.

In a bizarre interview posted at volkmarguido.weebly.com, Hable says he was born in Copenhagen and his family moved to Sydney when he was just three years old. There, he remained until after university. The interview introduces Hable as “a New York City ex-pat who gave up her high-paying corporate job in advertising to create a wellness retreat in the tropics” and who “was able to walk away from her corporate life to turn her passion into a career.”

Except that isn’t true, either. The interview was actually from Forbes, and conducted by Celinne Da Costa. She was interviewing Vickie Mogensen, who runs Waluaa Surf & Yoga. Hable simply copied the text and performed a find-and-replace to swap her name with his – even neglecting to change the feminine pronouns.

At this point, it may be wise to withhold trust in any of the information we find online about either Hable or Demedici – at least not information that he published himself.

I did come across this post written by Chris Parry back in 2018, which highlighted many of the same inconsistencies I found in my own investigation, including Hable’s tendency to copy biographies and replace the names with his own in a nonsensical manner.

Military Service

Hable’s Facebook page, inactive since August 8^th, 2022, says that he is from London, England, lives in Medina, Washington, and studied Geology at the University of British Columbia.

Numerous photos on Instagram imply – though never explicitly state – that he was in the military, potentially deployed in Afghanistan. But those photos are inconsistent about which branch of the military he was in, his role, and even which country he served – some pictures depict Canadian forces, others American.

Hable also claims that he was a “special forces operative” in some posts. Someone close to me is a US Marine who has served for 16 years and counting, so I asked him if it looked like Hable was former military. The answer was “initial thoughts are that he is not military.” I’ll let you make up your own mind about if there is any stolen valour happening here.

The Death of Volkmar Hable

Sadly, the website volkmar-hable.org has a notice saying Hable “after a short but severe illness passed away in the midst of his family.” According to that page, he died on 7 July, 2022.

Though news of his death may have been premature. You may recall that I already told you that Hable’s Facebook page was active until 8 August of that same year. There were several posts between those dates, including a geology lesson video in which Hable looks quite well.

I don’t know where he actually is today, but his last Instagram post – at least from the volkmar_therock account – was about a year ago and shows the Swiss Alps. It has the caption “View from home.”

Putting the Pieces Together

We now have a pretty clear picture and can draw some conclusions. The upcoming Indiegogo campaign for The Sword of Durandal showcases something that even the industry’s leading corporations, working with government contract budgets, haven’t been able to demonstrate. It is for a device that is, by any reasonable estimation, impossible to make with current technology. And if you’re wondering how Demedici came up with that nice render, the answer is simple: it is just a Syride SYS’Nav XL Vario GPS navigation device.

This is a man with – according to Canadian authorities – a history of fraud. This is a man who appears to have faked his own death announcement to escape the fallout from his ventures, just so he could start some new ones. This is also a man missing either the skill or motivation to cover his tracks with any kind of competency, which is why there was such an obvious digital trail for us to follow.

What needs to happen next? I’ve been in touch with Indiegogo, informing them of everything I’ve found and insisting they remove the campaign for The Sword of Durandal. I have also contacted the British Columbia Securities Commission.

Volkmar Guido Hable, Dr Guido Demedici, Jacob Jason Volkmar Guido DeMedici, or whatever he calls himself after he reads this article seems to me to be another in a long line of men who use technobabble to sell what accounts to digital snake oil. It is highly likely that he will simply move on to his next suspect business venture, as long as he remains free to do so. When he does, my hope is that this article is the first thing that comes up when someone starts digging. As we’ve already seen, the man doesn’t properly scrub his trail.