Executive Summary
French quantum businesses made significant strides to bring quantum products to market and to leverage the power of quantum technology to perform services across industries and fields. Pasqal and Thales were both mentioned in the media as a partner in the use of quantum to improve financial systems in the quantum era. Drug design and production is a tantalizing use case for quantum and France’s startups promise to be part of that revolution. We also saw the work of leading French scientists published in major scientific journals. Here are just a few — but not all — of the stories that demonstrate the France’s emerging quantum leadership.
Policy
King Wilhelm-Alexander and French President Emmanuel Macron Visits Quantum Hub
His Majesty the King Willem-Alexander and President Emmanuel Macron paid an official visit to Amsterdam’s quantum hub for a tour of the Quantum Gases & Quantum Information Lab and a round table on the significance of quantum for European open strategic autonomy. The visit, as part of the three days state visit of President Macron to the Netherlands, reflects the intensive cooperation between the Netherlands and France in quantum.
New Call for Proposals to Support Future French Big Techs
The Directorate General for Enterprise and the General Secretariat for Investment are launching a new support program, implemented by the French Tech Mission, focused on emerging players: French Tech 2030. This program aims to combine the investment strategy of the State and the support of the French Tech Mission to put them at the service of emerging players with high potential, in particular DeepTech, and to accelerate their development on all the themes targeted by the strategy of the France 2030 plan.
Business
Thales Prepares to Secure European Infrastructure Against Quantum Attacks
Thales experts are taking part in projects to develop quantum key generation, distribution and management equipment and the associated communication encryption devices, as well as defining the architecture of these quantum communication infrastructures.
Banks Face Existential Security Risk as Quantum Heats Up
France’s Pasqal mentioned in this article as a leading partner in helping banks and financial institutions prepare for the quantum era.
Pasqal on List of Potential Tech Unicorns in Europe
Pasqal was named to Tech Tour’s list of up and coming startups. Tech Tour and over 90 of the most active international VCs and growth funds vote based on factors such as revenue growth, market potential, and funding raised.
Qubit Pharmaceuticals in French Tech Health 20
Qubit Pharmaceuticals is a laureate of the very first class of the French Tech Health20, according to a LinkedIn post. The French Tech Health20 is a mentoring program of the Mission French Tech), in partnership with the Agence d’innovation en santé, dedicated to promising healthtech startups, and we are the first laureates!
Orange to Coordinate French Quantum Comms Effort
France has assembled a consortium of tech firms, researchers – and one telco – to kick off its deployment of quantum networks. The programme, called FranceQCI (Quantum Communication Infrastructure) falls under the umbrella of the European Union’s EuroQCI, which is co-funding individual member states’ projects and generally managing the whole thing. The aim is to ensure that critical communications between strategically important sites across the continent – like government agencies and financial centres – is safe from hacking.
QPerfect a French-based quantum startup was announced. The company’s mission is to: “provide a digital development environment and quantum solutions for scalable quantum computing, helping our customers innovate from hardware to software to make practical applications a reality today.”
Research
Entangled-photon Generators for Fault Tolerant Photonic Quantum Computers
The scientific results just published in the new issue of the journal Nature Photonics represents another “first” in the technological achievements of the quantum computing company Quandela, towards the development of photonic quantum computers.
Education and Events
France Quantum Scheduled for June
France Quantum will be held June 13, 2023. Co-founded by OVHcloud, the conference is aimed at boosting France’s quantum ecosystem and espouses an ecosystem philosophy, with the desire to be as inclusive as possible from research labs, startups, and large corporations or anybody involved in the quantum sector.
Four intense days of competition on quantum algorithms applied on 10 Business-Oriented THALES use cases (drone mission planning and trajectory optimisation, radar SAR processing and waveform design, anomaly detection on Sonar time series, ship refit scheduling, communication network routing, routing and shortest path for FPGA design, cybersecurity). This is the largest hackathon ever organized internationally for a Corporate company with 10 teams in 5 countries (Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Singapore), with 58 participants.
University of Troys Conference
The University of Troys organized an international conference on optimization using quantum computing.
France was well represented at QTech in Boston. There were several officials and founders who presented at and attended the conference. The conference covers the entire eco-system, with special sessions this year focusing on; the role of quantum technologies in life sciences, applications in financial services; quantum communications and cryptography for global telecoms, quantum in transportation and logistics, quantum for government and sensing and metrology applications.
Three Postdoc Positions Available in Quantum Error Correction in Grenoble, France
Three postdoctoral positions in quantum error correction are available in CEA-LETI, a research institute for electronics and information technologies, based in Grenoble, France.. Each position is for a period of 18 to 24 months, and is hosted by the error correction research group at CEA-LETI.
QC Ware, a leading provider of industry-disrupting quantum and quantum-inspired machine learning, and chemistry simulation solutions, announced the first-of-its-kind Q2B Paris Conference, presented in joint partnership with Bpifrance and running May 3-4, 2023.
If you found this article to be informative, you can explore more current quantum news here, exclusives, interviews, and podcasts.
