ColibriTD, a Paris-based quantum software company, has raised 4 million EUR (about $4.7 million) in a seed round led by Earlybird Venture Capital, giving the seven-year-old startup fresh capital to push its quantum-powered simulation platform from pilot projects into industrial production.

The round, announced on August 27, 2026, also drew participation from SymbiaVC and Medin VC. Earlybird is a returning backer: the Berlin-headquartered firm wrote ColibriTD its first institutional check, a 1 million EUR pre-seed, in September 2023. The new money takes total funding to roughly 5 million EUR, or about $5.8 million, since the company was founded in 2019.

What the company does

ColibriTD builds software, not hardware. Its core asset is H-DES, or Hybrid Differential Equation Solver, a proprietary variational quantum algorithm aimed at partial differential equations. That sounds abstract, but PDEs are the mathematical machinery behind fluid dynamics, structural deformation, electromagnetic behaviour and thermodynamic transport — in other words, most of the simulation work that aerospace, automotive and energy engineers do every day. Classical solvers handle them today at enormous computational cost; ColibriTD bets quantum processors can eventually do parts of the job faster.

The company delivers this as quantum-as-a-service, and deliberately stays hardware-agnostic. Its stack runs across IBM, AWS Braket, IQM, IonQ and fellow French startup Quobly, so customers are not locked to one qubit modality. Its QUICK-PDE offering is available through IBM's Qiskit Function Catalog. Co-founder and chief executive Dr. Laurent Guiraud leads the roughly 20-person team alongside co-founder Hacene Goudjil; most hold PhDs.

The numbers behind the round

At 4 million EUR, this is a modest raise by the standards of quantum hardware companies, which routinely absorb nine-figure sums. That is rather the point. A software layer that sits above whichever machine wins is a capital-light wager, and Earlybird venture partner Dr. Frederic Du Bois-Reymond framed the thesis bluntly, arguing that software determines where quantum computing's value is created and that ColibriTD has the credibility and traction to capture it.

Traction, for now, means seven completed co-construction projects with industrial partners spanning defence and aerospace, semiconductors, nuclear energy, automotive, finance, and space and climate. The proceeds go toward R&D on H-DES — specifically algorithmic efficiency and error mitigation, the two constraints that decide whether a quantum routine beats a classical one on today's noisy machines — plus hiring quantum researchers and application engineers in Paris, deepening hardware and academic partnerships, and commercial expansion across Europe and North America.

Why the timing matters

The quantum sector is in an awkward adolescence. Hardware roadmaps keep advancing, but the industry has struggled to name applications where quantum machines deliver commercial value now rather than after the arrival of fault tolerance. Guiraud pitched the round squarely at that gap, saying the company has proven quantum-powered simulation is a present capability rather than a future promise — a claim that will be settled by benchmarks against classical solvers, not press releases.

The raise also lands in a French ecosystem that has become unusually dense in quantum. State backing through the national quantum plan has seeded hardware players including Pasqal, Alice & Bob, Quandela and Quobly; ColibriTD represents the software tier that layer needs to reach industrial buyers. For Earlybird, doubling down after three years suggests the pre-seed thesis survived contact with real customers. For everyone else, the useful signal is that investors are now willing to fund the application layer of quantum computing on its own merits, at seed prices, without waiting for the hardware question to resolve.

Source

The Quantum Insider — "ColibriTD Raises EUR 4M to Expand Quantum Simulation Software"