Alice & Bob raises €100 million for its quantum computer

French quantum computing nugget Alice & Bob has raised €100 million from investors, putting it on a par with Pasqal, another national quantum computing player, which raised the same amount last year. 

While their technologies differ, Alice & Bob and Pasqal also share a link with École Polytechnique: Théau Peronnin, co-founder and CEO of the former is X2012, while Pasqal was co-founded by Alain Aspect, co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics and professor at École Polytechnique.

Graduates of ENS Paris and ENS Lyon respectively, Théau Peronnin and Raphaël Lescane, the other co-founder of Alice & Bob, have combined their respective work on modular architecture for one, and the first cat qubit prototype for the other, to open up a new path towards the universal quantum computer.

As a reminder, the qubit is the elementary unit of quantum computing. It can exist in a superposition state - i.e. both 0 and 1 simultaneously - which enables parallel calculations to be carried out, thus multiplying capacities 

The problem facing all those involved in quantum computing is the instability of qubits, which generates too many errors in the results of calculations. The scientific challenge is to correct these errors to achieve the computing power promised by quantum computing.

The approach developed by Alice & Bob consists in integrating within the qubit a first level of correction against a very frequent type of error, bit flips. 

Alice & Bob raised €100 million from Future French Champions, a joint venture between Bpifrance and Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Axa Venture Partners and Bpifrance via its DeepTech 2030 fund. Alice &Bob had already raised 27 million euros in 2022 in a first financing round.

The funds will enable the company to finance a 3,000-square-meter laboratory in the Paris region, with the infrastructure and equipment needed to work with materials on micro- and nanometric scales, and a fleet of prototypes to carry out more tests in real time. 

Alice & Bob plans to double its workforce, almost half of whom are PhDs, to 200 by the end of the year.

Alice & Bob is one of five French companies selected by the Ministry of the Armed Forces, which oversees the Ecole Polytechnique, as part of a program designed to equip France with two French-designed prototype quantum computers by 2032, with a power of 128 logic qubits. Alice&Bob is competing with Pasqal, Quandela, Qobly (ex-Siquance) and C12 on this program.