Alice & Bob, French quantum startup founded in 2020 with 40 employees announces two significant events that position the company as a leader of the global quantum race:

• The company raises a €27m Series A led by Elaia, BPI France and Supernova Invest, with historical investors Breega and business angels also participating in the round. This is the largest fundraising in the French quantum ecosystem. This operation comes less than two years after the seed round of 3 million euros.
  
• A multiplication by 100,000 of the lifetime of quantum bits (the elementary “building blocks” of quantum computers), making a major step toward the construction of a first functional quantum computer. A fully functional quantum computer is considered as one of the main next industrial revolutions and could transform industrial computing, from the capacity to exactly simulate molecules to the optimization of financial portfolios. This result brings the demonstration of a bit-flip resistant superconducting cat qubit during 2 minutes, making it a world first with previous records being limited to a few milliseconds. Those records were held by Google and Amazon.

This fundraising comforts the ambition of the startup: become the first in the world to deliver a logical qubit as soon as 2023.

Alice&Bob therefore plans to:

• Double its workforce and recruit the best physicists and quantum engineers in the world;
  
• Set up its own prototyping center with state-of-the-art technologies necessary to develop quantum computing applications, and do it in the heart of Paris;
  
• Develop industrial partnerships with its ecosystem, in particular corporates today exploring the potential of quantum computers.