The French quantum computing startup Alice & Bob SAS said today it has raised €100 million ($104.2 million) in a Series B round of funding led by Future French Champions, AXA Venture Partners and Bpifrance.

The round also saw the participation of all of the company’s Series A round investors, including Elaia Partners, Breega and Supernova Invest, plus new investors such as FFC and the European Innovation Council, underscoring the enormous optimism over its approach to the next evolution of computing.

Alice & Bob said the funding will help it on its mission to create the world’s first useful quantum computer by 2030, and it has come up with some novel technology to try and do that. The company is the creator of what it calls “cat qubits,” which are named after the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment.

Cat qubits are a special kind of superconducting qubit that are intended to make quantum computers more robust and resistant to errors. They address the problems with traditional qubits, which have the unique ability to be in a state of 0, 1 or a superposition of both, but are extremely sensitive to the environment. Any disturbances, even as minute as something such as a change to the Earth’s magnetic field, or the vibration of a pin dropping on the floor, can cause qubits to degrade, a process known as “decoherence.”

When that happens, the qubits lose their superposition state, resulting in computational errors. It’s a problem that technology giants such as Google LLC and IBM Corp. have struggled with for years.

But it’s a lot harder for cat qubits to experience decoherence, since they are error-protected through a process that stores quantum information across multiple particles, making them more resistant to environmental disturbances. They also feature a hardware-efficient design that reduces the requirements for a fault.

Alice & Bob says its cat qubits are especially good at suppressing “bit-flip errors,” which is one of the two main kinds of error that plague quantum computing platforms today. This property is key to building fault-tolerant quantum computers that can be useful in real-world applications.

The startup’s founder and Chief Executive Théau Peronnin (pictured left, alongside Executive Chairman Elie Girard) said the funding round marks a new phase for the company, which is now focused on building a quantum computer that will deliver valuable results.

“Cat qubits are unique, as they make scaling quantum computers practical,” he said. “Where conventional approaches would require millions of qubits, we would need only thousands.”

Alice & Bob said it plans to use the funds from today’s round to enhance the performance of its cat qubit-based systems and further improve its error correction capabilities, with the goal being to create the first error-corrected logical qubit. As such, around half of the money raised in the round will be spent on building a special laboratory and production facility. The rest of the money was earmarked for expanding the company’s team, which has already doubled in the past year.

This year could well be the year in which we see real quantum computing use cases emerge, assuming that the advances promised by Alice & Bob and other companies materialize, said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc.

“It’s interesting that European firms appear at the forefront of this race, with Alice & Bob just the latest quantum computing startup from the region to attract substantial funding,” the analyst said. “This is good for the quantum scene as a whole, as more diversity and regional competition is always a promising development from an innovation perspective. Now we have to see how fast Alice & Bob can bring its cat qubits online and make them work for practical business applications.”

AVP Managing Partner François Robinet shared Mueller’s optimism, saying he has been following the progress of the quantum computing industry for years already, and has become convinced that it’s leaving the pure research and development phase.

“It’s entering into an ‘industrial phase’ where it will soon address real-life use cases, thanks to the technology Alice & Bob is developing, which will reduce the hardware requirements for building a practical, large-scale quantum computer,” he said.

Quantum computing startups are getting a lot of momentum lately. Earlier this month, the Australian and German company Quantum Brilliance GmbH closed on $20 million in funding to begin mass-producing diamond-based quantum computers. That round followed Qolab Inc.’s $16 million seed funding round on New Year’s Eve.

Also last month, the San Francisco-based quantum startup BlueQubit Inc. closed on $10 million in funding, shortly after SandboxAQ raised a whopping $300 million to pursue the idea of “large quantitative models,” which are artificial intelligence models that run on quantum hardware.

Photos: Alice & Bob