France’s Quobly raises €115M for silicon-based quantum computing

Most quantum-computing startups ask the world to build them an entirely new industry , exotic materials, bespoke fabrication, supply chains that do not yet exist. Quobly is making a quieter bet.

The Grenoble company believes the path to a useful quantum machine runs through the silicon chip industry that already exists, and on Wednesday it raised €115M, roughly $133M, to prove that point.

The Series A is led by France’s state-backed Bpifrance, chipmaker STMicroelectronics and SEALSQ. Also participating are the European Innovation Council Fund, Blast, Air Liquide’s venture arm ALIAD, and existing investor Innovacom. This represents a significant jump from the roughly €21M the company raised last year to develop a 100-qubit chip, and it is explicitly aimed at industrialisation rather than pure research.

The investor list is the thesis in miniature. STMicroelectronics is one of Europe’s largest chipmakers, and Quobly’s approach depends on exactly that kind of partner. Rather than inventing a new way to build qubits, Quobly encodes them in silicon using the same fabrication techniques that already produce conventional processors at scale. If it works, quantum chips could ride the cost curve and the manufacturing base of an industry that has spent decades learning to make silicon cheaply and reliably.

That is the appeal, and it is why a battery of strategic and sovereign money has lined up behind it. Bpifrance brings the state’s patience and its half-billion-euro quantum ambitions. STMicroelectronics brings fabs. SEALSQ brings a stake in the European sovereign-infrastructure story that has become a fixture of the continent’s tech policy. Quantum computing has been folded into the same strategic-autonomy logic that drives Europe’s push on chips, AI compute, and defence.

Quobly plans to put its first commercial machine in the cloud by the end of 2026 under a product line called Alloy. The first system, Alloy Pioneer, is aimed at early adopters in high-performance computing and research. It will be accessible remotely in 2026 before deployment inside HPC infrastructure in 2027. The phasing matters: it is a roadmap toward integration with existing supercomputing rather than a standalone quantum moonshot.

The caveats are the ones that attach to the whole field. Silicon-based, or spin-qubit, quantum computing is one of several competing approaches, alongside superconducting circuits, trapped ions, photonics, and neutral atoms. No architecture has yet demonstrated decisive, fault-tolerant advantage at scale. Quobly’s pitch is that manufacturability beats raw qubit counts in the long run, but that is a bet on the future, not a result in hand. A 100-qubit chip is a milestone, not a working fault-tolerant computer.

What the raise does establish is that European capital is willing to fund the long game. €115M is among the larger quantum rounds the continent has seen, and the mix of public and strategic money signals an intent to keep the technology, and the manufacturing that underpins it, on European soil. The wider context is a continent that watched the AI-compute wave land largely in American hands and is determined not to repeat the experience with quantum.

Whether silicon proves the winning substrate is a question only the next few years of physics will answer. What Wednesday settled is narrower and still meaningful: Quobly now has the money to find out, and a chipmaker in the cap table to build it with. The first cloud machine is due by year’s end. After that, the qubits have to perform.