NVIDIA's NVentures expands its quantum portfolio by including Alice & Bob.

      The Paris-based cat-qubit firm has added NVentures to an already established cap table, which includes FFC, AVP, and Bpifrance, while strengthening its CUDA-Q partnership with Nvidia. Alice & Bob, a quantum hardware company with locations in Paris and Boston, is developing fault-tolerant machines built on its unique cat-qubit architecture. The firm has incorporated NVentures, Nvidia’s venture capital arm, into its cap table through an extension of its €100 million Series B funding round. The financial specifics of this investment have not been revealed. The announcement was made by the company on Friday.

      The initial Series B round, which closed in January 2025, was led by Future French Champions, AXA Venture Partners, and Bpifrance, and was valued at €100 million (approximately $104.9 million at that time). This funding round was one of the largest recorded in European quantum hardware and signaled a willingness of French sovereign capital—managed via Bpifrance and the state-supported FFC—to seriously invest in fault tolerance from a local operator. The NVentures extension adds to these existing backers rather than replacing them.

      Nvidia's interest includes both a strategic option and software integration. Over the past year, Alice & Bob has been connecting its cat-qubit hardware to Nvidia’s CUDA-Q platform and the NVQLink interconnect that Nvidia utilizes to connect accelerators and quantum processing units (QPUs). This integration is essential to Nvidia's quantum strategy, which indicates that it prefers to serve as the classical computing and software foundation that all credible quantum methods will eventually require alongside.

      The NVentures portfolio reflects this strategy, having invested in various leading hardware approaches over the past nine months: Quantinuum (ion trap) in its $600 million round at a $10 billion valuation, QuEra (neutral atoms), PsiQuantum’s $1 billion Series E (photonic), and now Alice & Bob (superconducting cat qubits). The thesis is focused on being hardware-agnostic while being anchored in software. Whichever architecture achieves fault tolerance first, Nvidia aims to have its tools integrated.

      The core concept behind Alice & Bob is that bosonic cat qubits can mitigate bit-flip errors at the hardware level, which the company believes will allow them to achieve fault tolerance with thousands of physical qubits instead of the millions required by less secure superconducting designs. The company has publicly aimed to create a "useful" quantum computer by 2030, which is the timeline for this new funding.

      This funding arrives during a period of heightened state involvement in the quantum sector. Recently, the US Commerce Department signed letters of intent to provide $2 billion in CHIPS Act funding to nine quantum companies, acquiring equity shares alongside the grants. France has had a similar initiative since 2021, with its €1.8 billion national quantum plan and the Proqcima program, which has been extensively covered by TNW. Alice & Bob is recognized within Proqcima as one of France's two designated quantum hardware champions.

      The extension does not reveal the size of the investment, the post-extension valuation, or whether NVentures secured any board observation rights. Alice & Bob has been cautious about disclosing details regarding its cap table, so further information is unlikely to be available unless it is included in a future fundraising round.