Alice & Bob retreats to the south of France with no laptops joined by mathematician Cédric Villani

Alice & Bob held retreat for all 150 employees to enjoy the city between the Alps & Mediterranean Sea to discuss the company’s future while building its culture

AIX-EN-PROVENCE, FRANCE, June 26, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Alice & Bob, a global leader in the race for fault-tolerant quantum computing, is taking its entire team to the south of France for a summer retreat featuring a keynote from prize-winning mathematician Cédric Villani.

Just like students who turn in their phones at the start of the school day, Alice and Bob’s 150 employees left their laptops back at the office in Paris.

“Alice & Bob is nothing without its people - and if we are to win this incredible technological race, it will be because we fostered the most powerful scientific team effort,” said Théau Peronnin, CEO of Alice & Bob. “As the company scales quickly and internationally, moments like these become key to maintaining our momentum.”

Aix-en-Provence, the historical capital of Provence, overlooks the Mediterranean Sea and sits at the foot of the Alps. The city was the home of Paul Cezanne, an Impressionist painter whose last studio was there.

At this retreat, the Alice & Bob team learned from a different but equally brilliant creative mind: Cédric Villani, winner of the Fields Medal, one of the highest honors a mathematician can receive. The medal is awarded every four years to mathematicians under 40 and has been considered the Nobel Prize for math since 1936. Villani won for his proofs of nonlinear Landau damping and convergence to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation.

Villani is currently a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques. In his keynote, he connected his math research, which focuses on determining how physical quantities such as heat energy and momentum change, with Alice & Bob’s cat qubits and the coming impact of quantum computers at scale.

“From Boltzmann and Maxwell to Von Neumann - and Turing and Shannon to Bell and Shor -quantum computing appears to be the next chapter in the human desire to harness mathematical and physical sciences to build ever more powerful computing devices,” said Villani during his speech to the company.

To build these powerful machines, Alice & Bob uses unique superconducting qubits with built-in error correction that prevents bit-flips, one of the main errors inherent in quantum computers. This design means that Alice & Bob can devote fewer qubits to error correction and more to computation. The lower overhead that results means useful quantum computers can be built with a fraction of the hardware resources competing approaches need.

About Alice & Bob     
Alice & Bob is a quantum computing company based in Paris and Boston whose goal is to create the first universal, fault-tolerant quantum computer. Founded in 2020, Alice & Bob has already raised €130 million in funding, hired over 100 employees and demonstrated experimental results surpassing those of technology giants such as Google or IBM. Alice & Bob specializes in cat qubits, a pioneering technology developed by the company's founders and later adopted by Amazon. Demonstrating the power of its cat architecture, Alice & Bob recently showed that it could reduce the hardware requirements for building a useful large-scale quantum computer by up to 200 times compared with competing approaches. Alice & Bob cat qubit is available for anyone to test through cloud access. Follow Alice & Bob on LinkedIn, X or YouTube, visit their website www.alice-bob.com, or join The Cat Tree on Slack to learn more.

Christian Balzora
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