C12 recently announced a funding round of €18 million ($19.4 million at today's exchange rates). The company was originally founded in 2020 as a spinoff from the École Normale Supérieure's physics laboratory and has been working on a proprietary process for creating quantum computers based on carbon nanotubes.
The concept of quantum computing is not new, but it is still in development. Many scientific teams are working on the subject from different angles. The goal is to create large quantum computers that can perform calculations with fewer errors.
But wait, why do we need quantum computers in the first place? Computers as they exist today are based entirely on electronic transistors. And we've gotten really good at miniaturizing them, allowing us to pack more and more transistors onto a single chip. As a result, computing power has advanced exponentially over the past 60 years.
But current computer architectures have limitations: even as companies start building larger data centers, there are some problems that traditional computers cannot solve, and it's unclear whether Moore's Law will continue to hold true in the future.
This is where quantum computers could help.
“If you want to create models — exhaustive simulations of chemical reactions — to understand how a new drug interacts with cells, you can't do that with traditional approaches,” C12 co-founder and CEO Pierre Desjardins (pictured right) told TechCrunch.
“There are loads of optimization problems to solve, in transportation, logistics, manufacturing, etc. — there are too many variables and too many possible scenarios, so it's impossible to do it with a classical computer,” he continued.
His brother, Matthieu Desjardins, has a PhD in quantum physics and serves as the company's CTO. During our conversation, Pierre Desjardins even called his brother a “scientific genius.”
And since it's 2024, there's also the AI angle that makes it all the more compelling that quantum computing research matters: “Today, training a large language model means consuming enormous amounts of energy,” says Pierre Desjardins. “And quantum is also a way of computing that uses much less energy.”
How to build a quantum computer
According to C12, the two main differences between their team and other teams developing quantum computers are that they use a different material (carbon nanotubes) and that they employ a specific manufacturing process (a currently patented nanoassembly process).
“Right now, I think we are the only people in the world who can control this very special process of putting carbon nanotubes on top of a silicon chip. And what's really interesting is the scale: a carbon nanotube has a diameter 10,000 times smaller than a human hair,” said Pierre Desjardins.
Image credit: C12
Research teams at big companies like Google, IBM and Amazon are now focusing on other processes, most of which use superconducting materials such as aluminum on top of a silicon substrate.
According to C12, this method led to early breakthroughs, but it doesn't work at scale because the use of aluminum creates interference when you start adding qubits. Quantum is not yet mature, but C12 believes it is working on the next generation of quantum computing compared to these aluminum-based processes.
The company has set up its first production line in a basement near the Panthéon in Paris, where it will manufacture carbon nanotubes, control them and integrate them with silicon substrates.
“It's already up and running. Right now we're making about one chip per week and testing it in a mini data center,” Pierre Desjardins said. But don't expect quantum computers to arrive anytime soon. “We're still only validating the fundamentals,” he added. The company is currently focusing on chips with one or two qubits.
Emulating Quantum
As the research and development work progresses, the C12 team is also working on a business ecosystem: Like many quantum companies, C12 has developed an emulator called Callisto that allows developers to write and run quantum code on classical computers.
We probably won't get the results we can get with a quantum computer, but at least we'll be ready to put it into practice as soon as quantum computers become available.
“Today we are focusing on two sectors: the chemical industry, where we use it to simulate chemical reactions, and the energy industry, where we mainly use it for optimization problems,” Pierre Desjardins said. Notably, the startup is partnering with Air Liquide.
Image credit: C12
Returning to the funding round, Varsity Capital, EIC Fund and Verve Ventures have invested, with existing investors 360 Capital, Bpifrance's Digital Venture fund and BNP Paribas Développement also participating again in this round.
C12 currently employs 45 people from 18 countries, including 22 PhD holders. With the funding it recently raised, C12 plans to enter into collaboration agreements with more industrial partners. But the company also has research goals.
“Another goal is to, for the first time, perform a quantum operation between two qubits that are far apart,” said Pierre Desjardins, who said that far apart means “tens of micrometers” apart from each other. That doesn't seem like much, but it has important implications for scaling up quantum computing.