At Nord Quantique, we’re building fault-tolerant quantum computers from the qubit up with the goal of making quantum computing practical at scale. We’re a Canadian company based in Sherbrooke, Québec, where we develop superconducting quantum computers that integrate quantum error correction directly into the hardware. Rather than accept that useful quantum computers will require millions of physical qubits, we’ve taken a different path by designing qubits that are intrinsically more resilient to errors through bosonic encoding. It fundamentally changes the economics and engineering of quantum computing by reducing the hardware overhead needed to build useful systems.

We embed error correction directly into the hardware via superconducting bosonic codes to achieve a 1:1 logical-to-physical qubit ratio. The company recently advanced to Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative and reached unicorn status with a $1.4B valuation in our latest funding round.

Reliable computations

The biggest challenge in quantum computing isn’t creating qubits—it's performing reliable computations with them. Quantum information is extraordinarily fragile: Every operation, measurement, or interaction with the environment introduces errors that quickly accumulate. Quantum error correction is essential, because it allows errors to be detected and corrected while computations are running.

Most approaches achieve this by encoding a single logical qubit across many physical qubits so that individual errors can be identified and corrected. While effective in principle, this strategy comes at a significant cost: It requires vast hardware resources and substantially increases the number of operations needed to perform a logical computation, slowing the effective clock speed of the processor. This combination of hardware overhead and reduced computational throughput is one of the biggest obstacles to building practical, large-scale quantum computers.

Bosonic qubits

Our approach starts with a different kind of quantum hardware. Instead of engineering devices that behave as simple two-level systems (qubits), we use microwave fields confined within superconducting 3D cavities that naturally support a much richer set of quantum states. Rather than treating these additional states as a source of errors, we use them to encode a special logical qubit that detects and corrects its own errors as they occur. These are known as bosonic qubits.

Among the different bosonic encoding methods, our architecture is designed to achieve a 1:1 ratio between a logical qubit and a physical cavity, which dramatically reduces the hardware overhead of fault-tolerant quantum computing while preserving a much higher effective computational speed. Although controlling these higher-dimensional quantum systems is more demanding, we believe mastering this complexity is a far more scalable path than assembling each logical qubit from hundreds or thousands of conventional two-level qubits. This is what we mean when we say we are building a quantum computer from the qubit up.

Quantum error correction and scalability

Quantum error correction is no longer just a theoretical concept—it’s becoming an engineering discipline. Our first milestone was demonstrating quantum error correction could actively protect a bosonic qubit by extending the lifetime of the encoded quantum information. We initially achieved this via a single microwave mode within a superconducting cavity, an encoding known as a GKP qubit.

But our long-term vision is to go beyond single-mode encodings by exploiting multiple microwave modes within the same physical cavity. These multimode bosonic codes use the additional degrees of freedom available within the cavity to build even more powerful error-correcting qubits without increasing the number of physical hardware elements.

We became the first to demonstrate such a multimode qubit, the Tesseract, which encodes quantum information across two microwave modes of a single cavity. It outperforms single-mode approaches while preserving our one-to-one logical-to-physical architecture.

Most recently, we demonstrated the other essential building blocks of a quantum computer in this platform, including high-fidelity state preparation, control and measurement comparable to conventional qubits, as well as logical two-qubit operations between bosonic qubits. While significant improvements in performance are still required before large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing becomes practical, we’ve now demonstrated all the fundamental ingredients of our architecture.

Quantum computing misconceptions

One of the biggest misconceptions about quantum computers is that they’re simply faster versions of classical computers—but they aren’t.

Quantum computers are specialized machines designed to solve certain classes of problems that become intractable for even the world’s largest supercomputers—problems in areas like chemistry, materials discovery, optimization, and cryptography. For everyday computing tasks, your laptop will remain the better tool.

Another misconception is that building more qubits automatically brings us closer to useful quantum computing. In reality, qubits only matter if they’re reliable. It’s why quantum error correction has become the defining challenge for the industry. The companies that solve scalability and reliability—not just qubit count—will ultimately determine when quantum computing delivers real-world impact.

Role of optics and photonics

Photonics plays an important role throughout the quantum computing stack—even for companies like ours that build superconducting quantum processors. Precision lasers and optical technologies underpin many of the manufacturing, metrology, and characterization techniques used to fabricate and validate quantum devices. High-performance optical instrumentation is also essential to test components and maintain the precision required for advanced quantum hardware.

More broadly, photonics is one of the foundational technologies enabling the quantum industry. Whether it’s quantum communications, photonic quantum computing, or the tools used to manufacture and measure quantum systems, advances in optics are helping move the entire field forward. Progress in quantum computing increasingly depends on progress across the broader photonics ecosystem.

Quantum advances

The biggest shift underway within the quantum world is that the industry is becoming much more focused on utility rather than headline metrics. For years, progress was measured largely by qubit count. Today, the conversation is increasingly about logical qubits, error rates, fidelity, and ultimately whether a system can solve commercially relevant problems.

We’re also seeing remarkable progress across multiple hardware platforms simultaneously. Superconducting circuits, trapped ions, neutral atoms, and photonic systems are all advancing rapidly and each contribute new ideas to the field. It’s a sign of a healthy and maturing industry. The next phase won’t be defined by who builds the biggest quantum computer—it will be defined by who builds the first truly useful one.

Sherbrooke’s quantum ecosystem

Sherbrooke, Canada is home to one of the world’s most concentrated quantum ecosystems. Our company was spun out of the Université de Sherbrooke’s Institut Quantique, and many of our researchers continue to collaborate closely with the academic community.

It’s a unique place because of its tight integration between world-class research, specialized infrastructure, government support, and a growing cluster of quantum companies. This proximity accelerates everything from recruiting exceptional talent to rapidly translating scientific discoveries into commercial technology. It allows a startup like ours to innovate much faster than if these pieces were spread across different regions or countries.