We’re serious about science. But we’ve never believed branding has to look like a physics textbook.
2019: The Beginning
Summer 2019. Alice & Bob wasn’t a 200+ people company. It wasn’t funded, it wasn’t scaling, it was a group of post-docs working on a problem most people would politely pretend to understand.
Like most early-stage research projects there was no lack of talent in the room, only that it was more the type of talent that gets you published in the science journal Nature rather than the one that helps you build the brand of a tech startup. Raphael’s evident gift for designing superconducting circuits, didn’t unfortunately translate to logos too. So it was up to Théau, he did what any quantum physicist with internet access would do before AI: he typed “cat-line-art” on Google Images. Then he did what scientists naturally do. He added layers.
This is what he came up with:
- A cat shaped like an ampersand (&), because cat qubits. (obviously).
- A bracket hidden in the lines. (subtle).
- A tensor product symbol embedded into the geometry. (genius).
- A cross structure that rewarded you for staring at it long enough. (marketing coughs gently).
It was clever, layered and made you feel slightly smarter for noticing things. It was also… doing a lot.
As Théau later put it: “We were trying to kill too many birds with a single stone.” In physics, elegance often means removing complexity until only the essential structure remains. In logos, apparently, the same principle applies. So much effort had been put in designing the cat-ampersand, that the colors and fonts chosen for the rest of the original logo didn’t get enough attention. But it was enough back then.
What mattered the most was that the seed had been sown. The idea of using a cat as the protagonist of the company logo, would have been the single most successful decision for the company’s branding and graphical universe in the years to come.
2020: The Logo Finds Its Shape
By February 2020, we secured funding. By March 2020, the world hit pause. Between starting the company and getting through a global pandemic, everything was changing around the early Alice & Bob’s team. It became clear that the logo needed an update too. Not because the cat was wrong. The cat had personality, but it did not need to explain quantum mechanics in every curve.
It was then that Théau’s brother suggested working with a talented designer and longtime friend, Natasha Bourguet.
The brief couldn’t have been simpler. Keep the cat but make it part of a universe. Let go the treasure hunt and make it unmistakable.
That is when the yellow circle appeared.
The new logo placed a black cat inside a bold golden circle.
The circle is not random. It represents the cryostat that houses our superconducting circuits, our cat qubits. These cryostats are no more no less than extremely powerful fridges that can reach temperatures a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero, the lowest temperature admitted by nature. Cryostats are generally cylindrical and the components inside them are gold plated hence the yellow color.
The cat itself is of course a reference to our signature innovation, the cat qubit (quantum bit). The cat qubit chips are placed inside our cryostats exactly like the cat is within the circle in our logo.
You may wonder why our qubits are called cats, ad this is not a marketing trick, as much as we would have loved to be the ones who came up with the term “cat qubit”, it actually predates our company and originates well before the start of quantum computing research completely. The name is a direct reference to, well of course, Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment. “Cat” state was first used to indicate a very peculiar phenomenon in the field of quantum optics that resembled the dead and alive condition of Schrödinger’s cat. The same phenomenon is at the base of the inner workings of Alice & Bob’s qubits.
Science definitely did not disappear from our logo. It just stopped hiding.
The cat is sharp, confident, and slightly moody, which felt appropriate. There is a hint of Batman energy, not in a dramatic, cape-flying way, but in the sense of being technologically advanced for humans and carrying quiet strength. It does not try to impress you. It simply stands there, calm and self-assured, as if it already knows the outcome.
The stare? It does not look cute. It looks like it knows something you don’t. At this point, the cat stopped being a clever design element and became something else entirely.
A character. We even gave it a name. But that story deserves its own blog.
The old blue-gray color of the ampersand and the rather standard and round font of the logomark were abandoned, a new thin and angular font was chosen to balance out the bold appearance of the logo and hedge the risk of coming across as too playful or cartoonish.
2026: A Stronger Wordmark
Fast forward to 2026, and Alice & Bob is no longer the same company it was in 2019. We’ve grown in size, in confidence, and in clarity about what we stand for. It only made sense that the wordmark would grow with us. Not the cat though. The cat very much stays. We don’t mess with a symbol that has so much personality and mood. Some things earn their place.
The 2026 update focuses on the logomark. The typography is bolder, the proportions feel more balanced, and the overall presence is stronger. It seems more confident sitting next to our very decisive cat icon.
We kept the same angular style as the previous font, while making it considerably heavier. (Design credits: Guillaume Gennet). We love this elegant typography which also echoes the line of the cat’s ears from the icon. The ampersand is the midpoint of the wordmark where it should find balance. To achieve that since “Alice” is longer than “Bob” we had to shorten the letters “L”, “C” and “E” and increase the width of the two “Bs” and the “O”.
The whole font was also made taller and the spacing between letters reduced to make it more compact. The ampersand is a focal point, so we kept that and enlarged the yellow dot at the end of it, the dot not only attracts the focus while adding making it more dynamic, it also echoes our circular yellow icon. Now we have a wordmark that we wouldn’t shy away from using alone when necessity arises, even without our icon.
Looking back, the evolution does feel honest. The first logo showed how much we wanted to say. The second showed who we were becoming. The third reflects who we are now. Sometimes growth is not about adding more. It is about knowing what to keep, what to simplify, and what deserves to stay exactly as it is.
And sometimes, what doesn’t change is a cat. One with a name, a strong personality, and a tale of its own. We’ll tell you that story next.
