ColibriTD Raises €4M for Quantum Simulation Software
ColibriTD, a French quantum software firm, has successfully closed a €4 million Seed funding round. Earlybird Venture Capital led the round, with participation from SymbiaVC and Medin VC. The funds will be allocated to research and development of its variational algorithm, team expansion, and strengthening partnerships. This early-stage investment will support the company’s development work, as it currently has approximately 20 employees.
Funding allocation
According to the August 27 report, this new funding follows an earlier €1 million Pre-Seed investment from Earlybird. ColibriTD plans to use the capital for R&D on H-DES, its Hybrid Differential Equation Solver, and to recruit quantum researchers and domain engineers for client projects. The company reports that most of its approximately twenty team members hold PhDs.
H-DES is a proprietary variational quantum algorithm which aims to solve partial differential equations used to model phenomena such as fluid flow, material stress, and financial risk. Though variational methods can run on current noisy quantum hardware, their ability to outperform classical solvers on real-world problems remains an open question. ColibriTD hasn’t yet published benchmarks demonstrating an advantage over classical simulation in this announcement, so the performance claims are the company’s own.
The platform is hardware-agnostic, and supports various providers including IBM, AWS Braket, IQM, IonQ, and Quobly. This flexibility allows customers to utilize the solver without being tied to a single machine.
“Present capability” claim
ColibriTD states it has completed seven co-construction projects across six sectors, including aerospace, semiconductors, nuclear energy, automotive engineering, and finance. CEO Laurent Guiraud, who co-founded the company in 2019 with Hacène Goudjil, interprets this as evidence that quantum simulation is already delivering tangible results. In the press release, he asserts it is “a present capability, not a future promise.”
This framing reflects the founder’s perspective. Though seven pilot engagements demonstrate industrial interest and repeat collaborations, they don’t inherently prove that a quantum solver outperformed the classical tools already in use by these engineering teams. The release doesn’t specify which problems were solved more quickly, cost-effectively, or accurately compared to existing methods.
The company’s QUICK-PDE tool is present in IBM’s Qiskit Function Catalog for Premium and Flex Plan users. Scott Crowder, Vice President of Quantum Adoption and Business Development at IBM, described it as a tool for domain experts to explore quantum-classical workflows in areas like fluid dynamics and materials deformation.
ColibriTD is actively seeking additional co-construction partners in the finance, defense, semiconductors, aerospace, automotive, and energy sectors. The report didn’t disclose terms of the round, beyond the €4 million headline figure.