Nord Quantique: Building a global quantum champion
The global race to build a working quantum computer was in full swing and Nord Quantique is in a leading position.
From drug discovery to logistics, cryptography and materials science, quantum computers will crack problems that today’s most powerful supercomputers never will. Whoever builds one first will gain a decisive edge in economic competitiveness and national security. That's why governments now treat quantum as sovereign infrastructure, on par with semiconductors.
But before the promises of quantum computing can be realized, scientists and entrepreneurs need to solve a single problem: reducing the number of errors. Today's quantum machines are so noisy that meaningful computation requires thousands of physical qubits to produce a single reliable one. Scaling alone won't fix it.
Nord Quantique's bet, made when co-founders Julien Camirand Lemyre and Philippe St. Jean spun the company out of the Université de Sherbrooke's Institut Quantique in 2020, was that the industry was solving the wrong problem. The answer wasn't more qubits—it was better ones. Their approach builds error correction directly into the hardware, removing the need for the massive overhead competitors require.
In 2023, Nord Quantique became the first company in the world to demonstrate hardware-efficient quantum error correction, a result the field had assumed was years away.
BDC backs emerging champions with a real shot at doing something great—and keeps them in Canada.
Julien Camirand Lemyre
co-founder and CEO, Nord Quantique
Scaling with the help of BDC
When Nord Quantique’s team went looking for capital in 2021, they had six employees, a thesis most of the industry disagreed with, and a technology that took a decade of physics to develop and would take years to commercialize. That's a profile most venture funds won't touch. It's also exactly what BDC Capital's Deep Tech Venture Fund exists to back.
BDC co-led Nord Quantique's $9.5M seed in January 2022. The capital got the company to its world-first demonstration. Just as important, the deal kept the company headquartered in Sherbrooke.
“There were opportunities to raise capital elsewhere, but having BDC invest meant we could continue building Nord Quantique in Canada,” Lemyre says. “For a technology as strategic as quantum computing, that matters.”
Ottawa agrees: Quantum is named a sovereign capability in Canada's Defence Industrial Strategy.
Growing traction since founding
Buoyed by this success, Nord Quantique has grown from six to more than 80 employees in roughly four years.
The company also applied to join the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The initiative aims to produce a viable quantum computer by 2033.
Nord Quantique was selected for Phase A alongside 20 firms globally, then advanced to Phase B as one of 11 remaining firms—and one of only three Canadian companies. The two others are Toronto’s Xanadu (another BDC-backed firm) and Vancouver’s Photonic Inc.).
In 2025, the company was also selected for the Canadian Quantum Champions Program, which funds Canadian companies to accelerate quantum computing development.
Camirand Lemyre credits BDC for more than the cheque. “BDC didn't just invest in our company—they invested alongside us. From board discussions to strategic decisions, they've been a partner through every stage of our growth.”
The company is now raising its next round to scale infrastructure, hiring and the path to a commercially viable machine.