NVIDIA's NVentures has included Alice & Bob in its quantum portfolio.

      The Paris-based cat-qubit firm has added NVentures to its capitalization table, which is already supported by FFC, AVP, and Bpifrance, and has strengthened its CUDA-Q partnership with Nvidia. Alice & Bob, the quantum hardware company located in Paris and Boston that is developing fault-tolerant machines using its proprietary cat-qubit technology, has included NVentures, the venture arm of Nvidia, in an extension of its €100 million Series B funding round. The financial details of this new investment have not been revealed. The company announced the round on Friday.

      The initial Series B was concluded in January 2025, 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 signified a strong commitment from French sovereign capital, facilitated by Bpifrance and the state-supported FFC initiative, to support a serious domestic effort in achieving fault tolerance. The NVentures extension does not replace any of the previous investors but adds to their support.

      Nvidia's investment serves both a strategic purpose and aims at software integration. Over the past year, Alice & Bob has been integrating its cat-qubit technology with Nvidia’s CUDA-Q platform and the NVQLink interconnect, which Nvidia uses to connect accelerators and QPUs.

      This integration is crucial for Nvidia's outlined quantum strategy: instead of developing its own QPU, Nvidia aims to establish itself as the classical computing and software foundation that all credible quantum modalities will eventually require.

      The NVentures portfolio reflects this approach, as the fund has spent the last nine months investing in various major hardware technologies: Quantinuum (ion trap) in its $600 million funding at a $10 billion valuation, QuEra (neutral atoms), PsiQuantum’s $1 billion Series E (photonic), and now Alice & Bob (superconducting cat qubits).

      The investment thesis is both hardware-agnostic and software-focused. Nvidia aims to have its tooling available alongside whichever architecture achieves fault tolerance first.

      Alice & Bob's technical premise is that bosonic cat qubits can reduce bit-flip errors at the hardware level, allowing the company to potentially achieve fault tolerance with thousands of physical qubits, contrasting with the millions required by less protected superconducting designs. The company has set a public goal of creating a “useful” quantum computer by 2030, which aligns with the timeline for this new funding.

      Additionally, this funding comes at a time of significant state involvement in the sector. Recently, the US Commerce Department signed letters of intent for $2 billion in CHIPS Act funding to nine quantum companies, taking equity stakes along with the grants. Since 2021, France has implemented a similar initiative through its €1.8 billion national quantum plan and the Proqcima program, which has been extensively covered by TNW. Alice & Bob is recognized as one of the two designated quantum hardware champions under Proqcima.

      The extension does not provide details about the size of the investment, the post-extension valuation, or the possibility of NVentures obtaining any board observation rights. Alice & Bob has been cautious about the information it shares regarding its capitalization table, and further details are unlikely to emerge unless a subsequent funding round offers price confirmations.