Alice & Bob, a French startup that designs and builds quantum computers, has raised a €100m Series B round, half of which will be dedicated to funding a new 4,000 square metre industrial site near Paris.
The site will host the production of larger prototypes as the company doubles down on research and development to increase the size and the performance of its devices. The other half of the fundraise will be used to double the team to 200 employees in the next 18 months.
“The focus of this fundraise is not to start at-scale production, but to massively increase our R&D capabilities to build a device that is larger and higher-performance,” says cofounder Théau Peronnin.
Quantum computers are expected to unleash unprecedented amounts of compute power once they reach a certain scale. The technology could create up to $850bn of economic value by 2040, according to a forecast by Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
Companies around the world are racing to develop a fully-fledged device — ranging from US tech giants like IBM and Google, to startups like Paris-based Pasqal and Quandela, which have also raised chunky rounds in recent years.
The Series B, which Alice & Bob says is “almost exclusively equity”, was led by Future French Champions (FFC), an investment joint venture between French public bank Bpifrance and sovereign wealth fund Qatar Investment Authority.
Axa Venture Partners (AVP), the former VC branch of French insurer Axa, which is now independent, also led the round, alongside Bpifrance. Historic investors Elaia Partners, Breega and Supernova also participated in the fundraise.
Cat qubits
Alice & Bob, which launched in 2020, develops technology that it says partly resolves a major challenge in quantum computing: error correction.
Quantum computers’ capabilities are currently limited because qubits — the quantum equivalents of bits in classical computing, which store and encode quantum information — are prone to errors.
Around 1,000 qubits are typically necessary to create one fully ‘error-corrected qubit’, or ‘logical qubit’, meaning that scaling up quantum computers is still a significant engineering challenge.
Alice & Bob has developed ‘cat qubits’, which have built-in correction for a big chunk of these errors, a technology that is also being developed by US cloud giant AWS.
The French startup says that it has theoretically demonstrated that only five of its cat qubits are necessary to build one logical qubit. It plans to use the fundraise to create its first logical qubit, with the objective of scaling the technology to build a quantum chip with 48 cat qubits in the next two years (which would represent four logical qubits).
“This will be our first proper prototype of a quantum computer,” says Peronnin. “It will still be too small for industrial use cases but it will be the first complete demonstrator of our technology.”
Commercialising quantum computers
Alice & Bob is investing €50m in a new industrial site where these larger devices will be produced, which will also include an R&D unit to improve the quality of its quantum chips.
Peronnin says that the company is in “advanced discussions” with supercomputing centres keen to access early prototypes. Last year, the startup also received a €20m grant from the French defence ministry to participate in a competition programme to build a quantum computer with 128 logical qubits by 2028.
But Alice & Bob has yet to generate significant commercial revenue for its devices, which sets it apart from some of its competitors. Last year Pasqal sold a quantum computer to Saudi Arabian oil and gas giant Aramco, while Quandela has already sold a device to French cloud computing company OVH.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/alice-and-bob-100m-series-b-news/
