Alice & Bob’s next phase: scaling cat qubit hardware with a €100 million Series B

At the European Innovation Council Summit 2025 Théau Peronnin, cofounder and CEO of French quantum hardware firm Alice & Bob, outlined how the company intends to move from laboratory demonstrations toward a first full scale prototype. The announcement followed the company closing a €100 million Series B round in January 2025 led by Future French Champions, AXA Venture Partners and Bpifrance. Alice & Bob is also a beneficiary of the EIC Accelerator Blended Finance CatQubit project which provided both grant and blended finance support.

From physics PhD to founder

Peronnin describes a personal trajectory that began with an early fascination for experimental quantum physics. He studied engineering during the years around Serge Haroche’s Nobel Prize in 2012 and completed a PhD working on promising quantum hardware approaches. Together with fellow PhD student Raphaël Lescanne and other colleagues he decided to commercialise the technology when it became clear that skilled teams and the underlying physics were underfunded. The startup was founded in 2020 and Peronnin says the company has now reached roughly five years of operation.

What Alice & Bob is building

Peronnin says the cat qubit design reduces the number of physical components, footprint and cost of a full machine by up to 200 fold compared to some other platforms. That is a company claim which, if borne out by independent benchmarks of fault tolerant logical error rates and end to end system costs, would be material to the economics of scalable quantum computing. The claim also depends on many practical engineering factors such as control electronics, cryogenic infrastructure and manufacturability at scale.

The Series B: what the money will buy

Peronnin framed the €100 million round as the capital needed to move from demonstrator engines to a full scale prototype and a production capable development site. He emphasised that the financing is a consequence of recent technical progress and the signing of public procurement programmes. The round was led by Future French Champions, AXA Venture Partners and Bpifrance and closed in January 2025.

Beyond capital, Peronnin highlighted procurement contracts and EIC support as important validation steps that helped the company bridge the gap from proof of concept to prototype. He also warned against complacency noting that the race for commercial quantum advantage is only just getting started and that competitors, particularly in the United States, are preparing large scale efforts.

Context in the EU innovation ecosystem

Alice & Bob’s development illustrates several recurring features of the EU deep tech landscape. Public funding and blended finance through instruments such as the EIC Accelerator can de-risk high capital intensity projects and make later stage private investment more attractive. National and regional investors such as Bpifrance play a catalytic role in France by combining public backing with scale up capital. Meanwhile dedicated vehicles such as Future French Champions aim to concentrate resources on nationally strategic technology companies.

Public procurement was another lever Peronnin cited. Governments and publicly funded institutions that buy early generation hardware can create reference customers and provide technical validation that helps attract investors. That said procurement alone will not replace the heavy engineering and supply chain work needed to produce reliable, manufacturable quantum systems.

Timing and market expectations

Peronnin suggested that hardware roadmaps across vendors are converging towards 2030 as a milestone when ‘‘really impactful machines’’ may appear. This is an optimistic but defensible framing given that many hardware groups target the 2028 to 2033 window for fault tolerant demonstrations and early practical applications. The timing will depend on error correction breakthroughs, system integration, software co design and the emergence of near term use cases that justify investment in full scale machines.

Investors and policymakers should treat multi year timelines as the base case and plan for continued technical uncertainty. Even if one platform achieves lower overhead in the lab, the industry will still need reliable manufacturing, control electronics, calibration processes and ecosystem partners to deliver deployed systems.

Technical and commercial caveats

Cat qubits bring theoretical advantages but also engineering burdens. Implementations rely on high quality oscillators, precise microwave control, cryogenics and low noise instrumentation. Translating a laboratory demonstration into a factory ready product requires robust error budgets, supply chains for specialised components and a reproducible manufacturing process. Claims of 200 fold reductions in hardware or cost should be validated by independent performance metrics such as logical error rate per gate, overhead required for logical qubits and total cost of ownership for a fault tolerant machine.

Competition will not be decided by a single breakthrough. Different hardware approaches may trade off speed, connectivity and engineering complexity. The ecosystem value will come from software, compilers, benchmarking standards and application layer development as much as from the raw qubit design.

Advice to founders and the human element

Peronnin offered a candid message to aspiring quantum founders. He joked with a one word answer ‘‘Don’t’’ which he qualified by pointing to the relentless difficulty of building deep tech ventures. He invoked a quote attributed to Jensen Huang who said he would not have started Nvidia if he had known how hard it would be. The practical takeaway is that founders should expect sustained technical and organisational challenges and plan for a long haul while taking advantage of a narrow window of timing now or within two years to position themselves ahead of the 2030 horizon.

Peronnin also noted that being part of a skilled team of physicists and engineers was an asset that motivated the founding decision. For the EU ecosystem this underscores the need to retain talent and to build pathways that help teams convert academic excellence into industrial scale projects.

What to watch next

Key signals to monitor in the coming 12 to 36 months include published benchmarks of logical qubit performance, independent demonstrations of error corrected operations, the physical throughput of any new Alice & Bob development site and the company’s ability to deliver on public procurement milestones. Wider signals include consolidation or clustering of European supply chain capabilities and the pace at which venture and strategic capital flows into quantum hardware and systems integration.

Alice & Bob’s path will be instructive for European industrial policy. If the company succeeds in translating EIC and national support into reliable, manufacturable quantum systems it will validate a blended finance approach for deep tech. If the company struggles to scale, it will highlight the continuing gap between lab prototype and industrial production for quantum devices.

Further information

Alice & Bob was founded in 2020 and positions itself as a hardware company working toward universal, fault tolerant quantum computing. The company says its cat qubit design can reduce hardware requirements by up to 200 times compared to some platforms. It is supported by the EIC Accelerator Blended Finance CatQubit project. The recording of Théau Peronnin’s contribution to the EIC Summit 2025 panel discussion Scaling European Digital Technologies is publicly available through the EIC Summit video resources.

Disclaimer The claims in this article include assertions from the company about performance improvements and projected reductions in hardware. Those claims require independent validation through published benchmarks and reproducible demonstrations before they can be treated as established industry facts.