Alice & Bob, the French Quantum Computing Company Building FTQC

Alice and Bob is a French quantum computing company building a fault-tolerant machine around an unusual hardware bet called the cat qubit. Founded in Paris in 2020, the company argues that protecting qubits against one entire class of error at the physical level can dramatically cut the number of physical qubits needed for error correction. That thesis has attracted backing from French state-linked investors and, in 2026, from NVIDIA’s venture arm, alongside a published roadmap aiming at 100 logical qubits by 2030. This profile reviews what the company does, where it came from, how its technology works, and how it sits among superconducting and error-correction rivals. 1. Cat qubits at the core. Alice and Bob bets that hardware-level bit-flip protection slashes error-correction overhead. The approach leaves mainly phase-flip errors to be corrected by software. 2. French roots, dual presence. The company was founded in Paris in 2020 by Theau Peronnin and Raphael Lescanne. It operates from Paris and Boston. 3. Record bit-flip stability. In September 2025 the company reported bit-flip times exceeding one hour. That figure dwarfs the 430-second record it set in 2024. 4. NVIDIA-backed Series B. NVIDIA’s NVentures joined an expanded Series B round built on a 100…