Théau Peronnin, The Physicist Betting Everything on the Cat Qubit

Théau Peronnin is the French quantum physicist who co-founded Alice and Bob in January 2020 and runs it as chief executive from offices in Paris and Boston. He built the company with Raphaël Lescanne, its chief technology officer. The two had worked alongside each other during Peronnin’s doctoral years. Alice and Bob builds one kind of qubit and nothing else. The whole company rests on that decision. It is a superconducting device called a cat qubit, engineered so that the most common hardware error, the bit flip, becomes extremely rare. The claim that follows is that far fewer physical qubits are then needed for each error-corrected logical qubit. Alice and Bob closed a Series B of 100 million euros in January 2025 and added an extension in May 2026 with an investment from NVentures, the venture arm of NVIDIA. The company has said it intends to deliver a useful fault-tolerant machine by 2030. Read that as intent, not as a schedule. Peronnin trained as an experimentalist before he became a chief executive. He spent years measuring superconducting circuits in the laboratory. His doctoral years at ENS Lyon included co-authoring the result the company was later built on, and the technology…