This article is from: srnnews.com

By Dominique Patton

PARIS, May 22 (Reuters) – French company Alice & Bob has won funding from Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures, it said on Friday, supporting its development of hardware to make quantum computing less error-prone at a time of surging interest in the technology.

The company did not provide details on the size of the investment, which came just after the Trump administration said it would take $2 billion in equity stakes across nine quantum-computing companies, in a major push to secure U.S. leadership in the emerging technology.

• Recent technological breakthroughs have deepened investor interest in quantum computing’s potential to speed up tasks ranging from drug discovery to financial modelling and cryptography.

• The “massive” increase in investment is being driven by a realisation that “computing infrastructure is becoming more and more crucial in our economies”, Alice & Bob CEO Theau Peronnin told Reuters.

• Alice & Bob, which has offices in Paris and Boston, focuses on “cat qubits”, a special type of quantum bit designed to be more resistant to errors than normal qubits, addressing one of the biggest problems in quantum computing.

• The new investment, which adds to a €100 million Series B round raised last year, follows collaboration between Alice & Bob and Nvidia on several projects recently that allowed the firm to demonstrate its talent and technology, said Peronnin.

• Alice & Bob’s technology helps build “very compact, very cost-efficient” quantum computers “positioning us really at the forefront of the race at the moment”, he added.

• The company is participating in France’s PROQCIMA programme, led by the Ministry of the Armed Forces, which aims to have two French-designed prototypes of universal quantum computers ready for industrialisation by 2032.

• “We hope for a strengthening of that public procurement programme,” said Peronnin, adding that public support of strategic areas “forces companies to deliver and it helps create champions”.

(Reporting by Dominique Patton; Editing by Sonali Paul)

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