Alice & Bob is a French start-up known for having the ambition to build a revolutionary quantum computer. Founded in 2020, the company announced, reports The Digital Factoryhaving raised the sum of 27 million euros to develop the “perfect qubit”, a qubit that would avoid increasing the number of qubits to correct possible errors.
Alice & Bob in search of the perfect qubit
Unlike quantum computing, classical computing is subject to the “bit-flip” type error, which exchanges a 0 to 1 or a 1 to 0. In quantum computing, we find the “phase-flip” error where a positive qubit becomes negative, and vice versa. The whole challenge of the quantum computer is to succeed in isolating a system to avoid errors.
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Since its creation, Alice & Bob has been developing superconducting qubits or Schrödinger qubits or cat qubits, less sensitive to errors than those developed by large firms such as IBM or Google. When these companies try to increase the number of qubits to correct errors, the French start-up seeks to develop an ideal qubit that does not make errors so that in the future it will be possible to assemble them to form a powerful quantum computer.
This type of qubit is based on the quantum state of Schrödinger’s cat from the famous eponymous thought experiment: a cat, locked in a box, confronted with the risk that a toxic gas will spread there. Until the box is opened, it is impossible to determine if the gas killed the cat, so it is both dead and alive.
Fundraising to take an additional step towards an error-free quantum computer
Thanks to a funding round led by Elaia, Digital Venture (Bpifrance), and Supernova Invest, Alice & Bob has just raised the sum of 27 million euros. This is their second fundraising after that carried out in 2020 for an amount of 3 million euros.
In parallel with this announcement, Alice & Bob claims to have succeeded in multiplying the life time of quantum bits by a factor of 100,000. In other words, the start-up claims that it can bring ” the demonstration of a bit-flip resistant superconducting cat qubit for 8 minutes “. A world first, according to the start-up since the first records were “ limited to a few milliseconds »
Thanks to this new financing, the company wishes to double its workforce by recruiting around forty new recruits. It also wants to set up a prototyping center in Paris and develop industrial collaborations with partners working around quantum computing. Alice & Bob aims to be the first structure to offer a perfect qubit by 2023.