Paris-based Alice&Bob, which is building fault-tolerant quantum processors, raises a €27M Series A co-led by Elaia, Bpifrance, and Supernova Invest
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2022 round is the opening move in an arc that has since compounded: the same Paris team went on to raise a €100M Series B in January 2025 to push its cat qubit architecture toward a fault-tolerant machine, making the €27M from Elaia, Bpifrance, and Supernova Invest the entry point that seeded that trajectory.
The round also slots into a dense Paris quantum cluster taking shape at the time — PASQAL had just raised a €100M Series B for neutral-atom machines weeks after this deal closed, and Aqemia was raising for quantum-physics drug discovery — with Bpifrance appearing as a backer across nearly all of them.
First-order effects
- Alice&Bob gets the capital to advance its cat qubit approach to error suppression, betting that fewer physical qubits per logical qubit shortens the path to fault tolerance; Elaia, Bpifrance, and Supernova Invest take early positions in a company that would later command a tripled-round follow-on.
Second-order effects
- Bpifrance's repeat presence across Alice&Bob, PASQAL, and later silicon-based Quobly makes the French state investment bank the de facto anchor of a national quantum portfolio, pulling private co-leads like Elaia into deals they might not price alone.
- Rival qubit-modality startups in Paris — neutral atoms at PASQAL, silicon spin at Quobly — now compete directly with cat qubits for the same engineering talent and the same next-round capital.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Europe's quantum industry consolidates around state-anchored national clusters rather than single dominant platforms, with each modality funded long enough to find out whether its error-correction economics actually beat the others'.
The trend: European quantum computing is scaling through successive, state-co-invested rounds clustered in Paris, where competing qubit modalities are being funded in parallel until fault-tolerance results pick the winners.