Alice & Bob, in the race to create the first universal, fault-tolerant quantum computer today announced a raise of €100 million in its Series B funding round, led by Future French Champions (FFC), AVP (AXA Venture Partners) and Bpifrance. FFC is a partnership between QIA and Bpifrance.
The funding will accelerate Alice & Bob’s path to build the world’s first useful quantum computer by 2030.
Founded in 2020, Alice & Bob has already raised €130 million in funding, hired over 110 employees and demonstrated experimental results surpassing those of technology giants such as Google or IBM. Alice & Bob specialises in cat qubits, a pioneering technology developed by the company's founders and later adopted by Amazon.
“Having established performance records with our cat qubits, Alice & Bob now enters a new phase focused on building a quantum computer that can deliver valuable results,” said Théau Peronnin, CEO of Alice & Bob.
“Cat qubits are unique, as they make scaling quantum computers practical: where conventional approaches would require millions of qubits, we would need only thousands.”
At the center of cat qubits’ hardware-efficiency is the inherent suppression of bit-flip errors, one of the two types of errors that plague quantum computers. This property is key to enabling more efficient architectures for Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computers (FTQCs) that resist errors and can be used in real-world applications.
Alice & Bob is the only player developing quantum computers exclusively with this type of qubit, which the company has pioneered since its inception in 2020.
All Series A investors, Elaia Partners, Breega, Supernova Invest and Bpifrance, returned for the Series B round, joined by new institutional investors, FFC, AVP, and the EIC (European Innovation Council), reflecting broad market confidence in Alice & Bob’s approach and future impact.
Alice & Bob will use the funding to enhance the performance of its system, improve error correction, and create its first error-corrected logical qubit. Nearly half of the funds will be used to finance the ongoing construction of a state-of-the-art lab and production facility, and additional funds will be used to further expand the team, which has doubled in the past year.
Elie Girard, Executive Chairman of Alice & Bob, added:
“Quantum computing is poised to transform industries, but the engineering complexity has remained a major hurdle.
Alice & Bob’s cat qubit innovation offers a clear path forward, combining efficiency and reliability to unlock quantum’s full potential. This funding allows for Alice & Bob to continue to grow as a company and leading player in the industry.”
According to François Robinet, Managing Partner, AVP:
"We are now convinced that quantum computing is leaving the pure R&D space and is entering into an ’industrial’ phase to soon address ’real-life’ use cases, thanks to the technology that Alice & Bob has been developing.
AVP is therefore proud to support the company in their mission to reduce the hardware requirements for building a practical, large-scale quantum computer.”
Lead image: Alice & Bob. Photo: uncredited.
