Quobly’s €115 Million Raise Puts Grenoble’s Chip Chain to Work

Quobly closed a €115 million Series A on June 3, 2026 to put silicon spin qubits on STMicroelectronics’ existing 300 mm line. The Grenoble company, a 2022 spin-out of CEA-Leti and CNRS, said the money moves it from lab checks to a first commercial box by the end of 2026.

The checks came from a chipmaker, a state bank and a post-quantum security firm, and they sit on a supply chain that already runs through Crolles, Soitec and Air Liquide. That is the part of the round the product name does not carry.

Bpifrance, ST and SEALSQ Wrote the Checks Together

Quobly announced €115 million Series A financing (about $133 million) led by Bpifrance, SEALSQ and STMicroelectronics. The European Innovation Council Fund, Blast, Air Liquide’s venture arm ALIAD and existing investor Innovacom joined. CEA, CNRS, Quantonation and Supernova Invest remain on the register. Bpifrance invested through the Deep Tech 2030 fund run for the French state under France 2030.

The company had already closed a €19 million seed phase between 2023 and 2025, then a separate €21 million Q100T package on May 22, 2025 made of a €15 million Bpifrance grant and €6 million of its own equity, aimed at a 100-physical-qubit silicon chip. Maud Vinet, CEO and co-founder, tied the new round to factory work rather than another science demo.

This financing marks a transition from technology validation to industrial execution. Over the past two years, we have demonstrated that silicon qubits can be developed within semiconductor manufacturing processes and integrated into a system architecture. With this Series A, we are accelerating the deployment of our first commercial systems and building a quantum computing platform designed to integrate into existing computing infrastructures. Our objective is to make quantum computing deployable, scalable and usable within real industrial environments.

Maud Vinet, CEO and co-founder, Quobly Series A announcement

Gwenaël Hamon, senior investment director at Bpifrance, called it the agency’s second cheque and said a quantum design that fits microelectronics standards is how Europe industrialises the field. Carlos Moreira, CEO of SEALSQ, joined the board after his firm came in as a lead investor in Quobly. On July 10, 2026 the two companies added a $5 million commercial contract to put post-quantum security into the silicon stack.

WHO PUT MONEY IN

Philippe Delmas, Quobly’s chairman, said the firm now sits where quantum hardware, chip making and high-performance computing overlap. The company lists more than 100 people in Grenoble, with offices in Singapore and Canada.

Soitec’s Silicon-28 Wafers Are Already in Crolles

STMicroelectronics is not a silent financial backer. On December 12, 2024 the chipmaker said it would adapt its 28nm FD-SOI manufacturing processes on 300 mm wafers so Quobly could build quantum processor units in a high-volume fab. The first phase targeted a 100-qubit machine and a path to show scaling past 100,000 physical qubits. Laurent Malier, executive vice president for global technology R&D, tied ST’s own cheque to that factory argument.

Quantum computing will achieve the scale needed by HPC customers only if breakthrough quantum systems can be industrialized and integrated with semiconductor-grade rigor and backed by a robust ecosystem. We are leveraging years of shared expertise in FD-SOI and deep technological collaboration to accelerate the commercialization of Quobly’s products thanks to a 300mm silicon fab environment. ST’s investment in Quobly further demonstrates our commitment to support its global ambitions.

Laurent Malier, Executive Vice President, Global Technology R&D, STMicroelectronics

Philippe Magarshack, then ST’s group vice president for strategy, technology and system architecture, had already put the same case on film: once the process recipes are set, scaling is mostly automation, because most of the steps already exist on ST’s FD-SOI flows near Grenoble.

On December 9, 2025 Quobly said the first custom silicon-28 FD-SOI wafers from Soitec were cycling inside ST’s Crolles plant, a first for an FD-SOI channel enriched in silicon-28. Nicolas Daval, Quobly’s chief engineering officer, said purified isotope-28 FD-SOI wafers let the company “anchor our developments in a solid and proven supply chain from purified gas to quantum chip delivery.” Christophe Maleville, Soitec’s chief technology officer, said the substrates show how engineered materials feed the next generation of quantum devices. The wafers are designed to cut isotopic noise and to open a path toward single-qubit gate fidelities approaching 99.999%, a target written on the substrate, not a published device result.

Quobly’s own site now states that 2.4+ million qubits have been fabricated at STMicroelectronics. That figure is wafer output, the count of devices printed, not a machine a user can run.

Alloy Pioneer Is Headed for OVHcloud and Scaleway

The first named box is Alloy Pioneer, built for early users in high-performance computing and research. Quobly said it will open through the cloud in 2026, then move into HPC rooms in 2027, with a matching footprint, power feed and utilities so it can sit beside classical racks. Users reach it through Alloy Forge, the company’s application workshop, which is meant to let teams write and check code against real hardware limits.

ALLOY ROADMAP DATES

• Cloud access: Alloy Pioneer is scheduled on public cloud by the end of 2026.
• HPC rooms: Physical deployment inside high-performance computing sites is listed for 2027.
• First scale-up: A first generation of systems is aimed at up to 100,000 physical qubits between 2027 and 2029.
• Long target: Quobly now states a goal of one million qubits by 2032.

On June 16, 2026 the company said Pioneer would join the OVHcloud Quantum Platform late in 2026. Two days later it added cloud access through Scaleway. Those bookings matter because they put a French silicon-spin machine next to other European quantum boxes already sold as a service, without waiting for a customer to accept a cryostat on the raised floor.

Why Quobly Stayed on a 28-Nanometre Node

Most quantum hardware groups still treat the processor as a physics object that needs its own plant. Quobly’s wager is the opposite. Silicon spin qubits store information in the spin of electrons held in tiny silicon dots, and the company wants those dots printed with the same tools that already cut automotive and industrial chips. Vinet has said other platforms already look strong on small systems, and that scale is the difference she is selling.

Daval has been blunter in trade briefings. He said the job is not to make one good qubit, it is to make a system with millions of them, and that once arrays grow into the hundreds and thousands, process spread is as dangerous as decoherence. “When we say we need millions of qubits, what we really need is stability, reproducibility, and yield. Those are things you only get from industrial fabs,” he said. In Quobly’s layout the useful distance between qubits is about 100 nanometres, which mature 193-nanometre lithography can hold, so the team stayed off the newest logic nodes. “Quantum devices are not transistors. What matters is the distance between qubits, not the gate length,” Daval said. At 100 qubits, he added, off-chip wiring is already a hard limit, which is why cryogenic control electronics have to sit on the same die.

That is also why FD-SOI technology ST pioneered is the process of record. Fully depleted silicon-on-insulator puts a thin silicon film on a buried oxide, which cuts electrical noise and lets designers bias the channel, a property Quobly wants for dense spin qubits and for classical electronics parked beside them. In late 2024 the company reported, at IEDM, co-integration of hole and electron spin qubits with cryo-electronics on that FD-SOI CMOS platform. The process is old by phone-chip standards. That is the point: a 28-nanometre flow already has yield data, toolsets and a plant that runs every week.

Test Rigs, a Dutch Lab and a 100 mW Cooler

Once the wafers exist, someone has to measure them, cool them and keep the isotope chain from breaking. The Series A week did not finish that work. The three months after June 3 filled in the subcontractors who actually have to deliver it.

THE INDUSTRIAL CALENDAR

1. December 12, 2024: STMicroelectronics and Quobly announce a manufacturing collaboration on 28-nanometre FD-SOI in 300 mm fabs.
2. May 22, 2025: Quobly closes the €21 million Q100T package for a 100-physical-qubit chip.
3. December 9, 2025: Soitec silicon-28 FD-SOI wafers start cycling in Crolles.
4. June 3, 2026: The €115 million Series A closes.
5. June 16-18, 2026: OVHcloud and Scaleway take Alloy Pioneer for late-2026 cloud access.
6. July 10, 2026: SEALSQ signs the $5 million security-integration contract.
7. September 2, 2026: MoUs with TNO and Orange Quantum Systems are signed in Eindhoven during a visit by French President Emmanuel Macron.
8. September 9, 2026: Absolut System signs an Industrial Partnership Declaration around the QCube cooler.

The Eindhoven papers are easy to over-read. They are test and metrology pacts, not a machine a lab can book. TNO, the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, will put its characterisation and materials labs against Quobly’s 300 mm platform so wafer-scale devices can be measured at foundry speed. Tjark Tjin-A-Tsoi, TNO’s CEO, said Europe already has the semiconductor kit and the science, and that pairing TNO’s test gear with Quobly’s platform can move silicon spin qubits toward commercial use. Vinet said the company has to solve the engineering behind the qubit as seriously as the qubit itself. Orange Quantum Systems, based in Delft, signed a parallel memorandum the same day on automated, high-throughput testing of silicon spin devices, the unglamorous work of watching how qubits vary across a wafer.

SEALSQ highlights the continued progress of its #SEALQuantum strategy through @Quobly_ 's industrial expansion.

New collaborations with TNO and Orange Quantum Systems help accelerate the transition of silicon-based quantum processors from research to industrial-scale…

— SEALSQ (@SEALSQcorp) September 8, 2026

Cryogenics is the other hidden bill. On September 9, 2026 Quobly and Absolut System said they had signed an Industrial Partnership Declaration and reached a first mark on the QCube 100-Class 3 platform, a high-cooling-power cryogenic stack built under the French Cryonext programme. The unit is specified to deliver 100 mW of cooling at 500 millikelvin and to carry the thermal, mechanical, electrical and radio-frequency interfaces the processors need. The cooperation is written as a four-phase plan that starts with qualifying that cooler and ends with volume production of platforms meant to support 100,000 physical qubits and beyond.

WHO HAS TO DELIVER THE STACK

• Orano: Purifies silicon-28 at a French stable-isotope plant, stripping out the nuclei that add magnetic noise.
• Air Liquide: Turns that silicon-28 into a gas for chemical vapour deposition, then invests through ALIAD.
• Soitec: Builds FD-SOI wafers on those films with its Smart Cut process.
• STMicroelectronics: Runs the 300 mm Crolles line and co-led the round.
• Absolut System: Supplies the 100 mW, 500 millikelvin cooler and the later volume cryostats.
• TNO and Orange QS: Measure materials, devices and wafer-scale spread so yield is a number, not a hope.

That list is why the round reads less like a startup payday than like a recapitalisation of a regional plant. The qubits only work if the isotope, the wafer, the fab, the fridge and the test bench all show up on the same schedule as the cloud listing.

Quobly Has Not Said How Many Qubits Pioneer Runs

The commercial calendar is now public. The qubit count on the first paid machine is not. Quobly’s Series A notice, the OVHcloud and Scaleway notes, and the Alloy Forge description all skip a number for Pioneer. The 100-qubit figure still belongs to the older Q100T chip programme. The 2.4+ million figure belongs to printed devices on ST wafers. A reader who wants to know how many qubits will actually be available through the cloud at the end of 2026 is still waiting on the company.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The round: €115 million closed on June 3, 2026, led by Bpifrance, SEALSQ and STMicroelectronics.
• The plant: Silicon-28 FD-SOI wafers from Soitec have been cycling in Crolles since December 9, 2025.
• The doors: OVHcloud and Scaleway are listed for late-2026 cloud access, with HPC rooms in 2027.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Pioneer’s size: No public qubit count for Alloy Pioneer.
• Wafer metrics: Early prototype numbers were flagged for the first quarter of 2026; Quobly has not issued a matching device scorecard.
• The 2026 date: Cloud access remains a year-end target, not a live listing.

The million-qubit line has also moved with the paperwork. In December 2024 Vinet talked about breaking that barrier on a nearer horizon; the company’s current product copy, restated in the TNO notice, puts one million qubits in 2032, with the 100,000-qubit band parked in 2027 to 2029. Silicon spin groups elsewhere have posted high two-qubit fidelities on 300 mm lines, so the manufacturing thesis is no longer unique to Grenoble. What is unique is the combination of a state bank, a European IDM, an isotope supplier, a wafer house, a cryogenics shop and two cloud doors, all pointed at the same 28-nanometre flow.

If Pioneer reaches those clouds on time, the first customers will log into a machine built like a chip, not like a physics experiment. They will also log in without a published qubit count, which is the gap the €115 million still has to close.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who Else Sat Around Quobly’s Series A Table?

Beyond the named equity leads, bank financing partners on the round included BNP Paribas, Bpifrance, Caisse d’Epargne Rhône-Alpes and Société Générale. Quobly’s financial advisers were Avolta and Rochefort & Associés, with Goodwin and Kelten on legal; investor counsel included Bignon Lebray, Jones Day and Rimon Law, and Forvis Mazars provided financial advisory support.

What Does FD-SOI Change for a Silicon Qubit?

Fully depleted silicon-on-insulator isolates a thin silicon film from the bulk wafer with a buried oxide, which lowers leakage and noise compared with bulk CMOS and lets the back of the channel be biased. Quobly uses that film as the host for electron-spin quantum dots and as the bed for cryogenic control transistors, staying on ST’s 28-nanometre node because the 60 to 120 nanometre pitches typical of spin qubits match that generation rather than a leading-edge phone process.

What Was Quobly Called When It Started?

The company was founded in Grenoble in 2022 as Siquance by Maud Vinet, quantum engineer Tristan Meunier and strategy director François Perruchot, then renamed Quobly from “quantum” and “Grenoble.” The 2023 seed was led by Quantonation with Bpifrance, Supernova Invest and Innovacom, and also drew Crédit Agricole Alpes Développement, CEA Investissement, Caisse d’Epargne Rhône-Alpes and BNP Paribas.

How Does Silicon-28 Get Onto an FD-SOI Wafer?

Orano purifies silicon into the silicon-28 isotope at a French stable-isotope plant. Air Liquide converts that material into a gas used in chemical vapour deposition, a standard CMOS step. Soitec then turns the film into FD-SOI wafers with its Smart Cut process, after which ST runs the lots in Crolles. Quobly describes that gas-to-chip path as the reason it can talk about yield in factory language rather than as a one-off lab trick.