Alice & Bob is a French startup known for having the ambition to build a revolutionary quantum computer. Founded in 2020, the company announced, reports digital factoryhaving raised €27 million to develop a “perfect qubit”, a qubit that would avoid scaling up qubits to correct potential errors.
Alice and Bob search for the perfect qubit
In contrast to quantum computing, classical computing is subject to a “bit-flip” type error, which alternates 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. In quantum computing, we find a “phase-flip” error where the qubit becomes positive negative, and vice versa. The whole challenge of a quantum computer is to successfully isolate a system to avoid errors.
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Since its inception, Alice & Bob has been developing superconducting qubits, Schrödinger’s qubits, or cat qubits, which are less sensitive to errors than those developed by large companies such as IBM or Google. When these companies try to increase the number of qubits to correct errors, the French startup seeks to develop a perfect qubit that does not make mistakes 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 a famous thought experiment: a cat, trapped in a box, runs the risk of spreading a poisonous gas there. Until the box is opened, it is impossible to determine if the gas killed the cat, so it is alive and dead.
Fundraising to take one step further toward an error-free quantum computer
Thanks to a funding round led by Elaia, Digital Venture (Bpifrance) and Supernova Invest, Alice & Bob has just raised €27 million. This is the second fundraising operation after that carried out in 2020 with an amount of €3 million.
In parallel with this announcement, Alice & Bob claim that they have successfully doubled the life span of quantum qubits by a factor of 100,000. In other words, the startup claims that it can achieve ” Demonstration of 8-minute superconducting qubit clamping resistance to bending “…the first in the world, according to the startup since it was the first records” Limited to a few milliseconds »
Thanks to this new funding, the company wants to double its workforce by hiring about forty new employees. It also wants to set up a prototyping center in Paris and develop industrial cooperation with partners working in the field of quantum computing. Alice & Bob aims to be the first structure to offer a perfect qubit by 2023.
