French quantum computing startup Alice&Bob raises €27M; plans to hire 30 employees over next two years

Paris-based Alice&Bob, a company on a mission to build a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer to help industries and researchers solve problems, announced that it has raised €27M in its Series A round of funding. The investment was led by Elaia (an existing investor), Bpifrance, through its Digital Venture fund, and Supernova Invest. Existing investor Breega also participated in this round.

Sofia Dahoune, Investment Director at Elaia, says, “As deep tech investors, we are convinced that some of society’s biggest challenges can be addressed by using breakthrough technologies created in research labs. As such, we regard quantum computing as one of the most promising world-changing technologies that could foster extraordinary progress across a broad range of applications.”

“Building powerful quantum computers”

According to Alice&Bob, Qubits are the fundamental building blocks of quantum computing, in the same way that bits are the foundation of classical computing. One of the biggest challenges in building a fault-tolerant quantum computer is the errors affecting qubits, which can be of two types: bit-flips and phase-flips.

Technology giants, including Google, Amazon and IBM, international academia and laboratories around the world are racing to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer. Researchers are pursuing one of five hardware approaches – neutral atom, spin, photons, trapped ions and superconducting qubits. Many of these approaches rely on a quantitative approach for reducing bit-flip and phase-flip errors, which would require tens of thousands of physical qubits to produce a quantum computer. The largest group of physical qubits that researchers have been able to produce so far is 127.

This is where the Paris-based startup is also looking to make a difference. In a scientific breakthrough, Alice&Bob claim that it has eliminated one of the main barriers to, and significantly reduced the complexity of, delivering a functional quantum computer.

Founded in 2020 by Raphael Lescanne and Theau Peronnin, Alice&Bob has demonstrated the capability of creating qubits that can resist bit-flips – it increased resistance to bit-flip errors from previous records of a few milliseconds to two minutes. These earlier records were held by Google and Amazon.

The company’s qualitative approach uses superconducting cat qubits which the team’s experimental evidence proves to eliminate bit-flip errors by design. With this discovery, Alice&Bob has created a shortcut to delivering a scalable universal quantum computer, reducing the number of qubits required by hundreds of times.

Alice&Bob founder Dr Raphael Lescanne says, “Our collaboration with Zaki Leghtas’ team has allowed us to demonstrate that a cat qubit resists bit-flips for several minutes, nearly 100,000 times the previous state of the art. This result confirms our choice of superconducting cat qubits as the building block for our quantum computer. It also consolidates our roadmap, the next step being removing the phase-flip error.”

Capital utilisation

Alice&Bob claim that the investment will fuel the next stage in commercialising the potential of the technology and realising the goal of large-scale production of a quantum computer. 

The company also has plans to hire 30 additional employees over the next two years, mostly with advanced physics skills, as well as developers and engineers supporting the commercialisation of its technology.