Some deadlines came closer this week. Alice & Bob cut the hardware it thinks is needed to break today's encryption, and ASM said it will reach its 2030 revenue target in 2027.
The building work still runs on longer clocks. Galileo's newest satellites are due in 2031, and a Portuguese osteoarthritis therapy reaches its first patients in 2028.
Lead
Alice & Bob Cuts the Qubit Count for Breaking RSA-2048 to 22,593
Alice & Bob published an estimate on 29 October that 22,593 physical cat qubits could factor a 2048-bit RSA key in 3.14 days. Breaking the 256-bit elliptic curves behind ECDSA and ECDH would take at most 29,588 qubits and about 62 minutes.
The Paris company says that is about 40 times fewer physical qubits than Google Quantum AI's 2025 estimate, and less than half its own 2023 figure of 49,649. Cat qubits suppress bit-flip errors in hardware, so the LDPC-cat code only has to correct phase flips.
Nobody has built such a machine, and Alice & Bob expects hardware to catch up in the early 2030s. It tells organisations to migrate to post-quantum cryptography now.
In Poland, the 20-person ResQuant is designing a chip that runs post-quantum cryptography in silicon for military and critical infrastructure. It has raised PLN 25 million this year and plans mass production in late 2027.
(Alice & Bob; IACR ePrint; Rzeczpospolita)
Biotech & Life Sciences
ALLOX Raises EUR 9.4 Million to Drug Hard Protein Targets
ALLOX, a spin-out of Barcelona's Centre for Genomic Regulation, raised a EUR 9.4 million seed round on 29 October. Asabys led through its Sabadell Asabys II fund, with Spain's CDTI and the Catalan public lender ICF joining.
Its platform measures the effect of thousands of mutations on a protein at once, mapping the sites that control folding and binding. The method comes from co-founder Ben Lehner's lab, which published it in Nature in 2022 and later used it to find allosteric pockets on KRAS.
The lead compound, ALX-001, is a preclinical allosteric inhibitor whose target has not been disclosed.
Exogenus Leads a EUR 13 Million Osteoarthritis Project
Portugal's Exogenus Therapeutics will lead ExoCordOA, a five-year, EUR 13 million Horizon Europe project announced on 29 October. Lonza and medical centres in Utrecht and Maastricht are among the partners.
The candidate, EXO-101, is a vesicle-rich secretome from umbilical cord blood cells. Exogenus wants to slow the disease itself, which no approved osteoarthritis drug does.
The grant covers Phase 1 and 2 work, but the first trial in patients with moderate osteoarthritis is not expected until early 2028.
Quantum & Photonics
IQM Entangles All 54 Qubits on Its Emerald Chip
IQM reported on 29 October that it had prepared a GHZ state across all 54 qubits of its Emerald processor, with a fidelity of 0.516 using readout error mitigation. Without mitigation it reached 0.515 on 40 qubits, and anything above 0.5 counts as genuine entanglement.
Cloud users could previously run comparable circuits on about 30 qubits. The gain came from software: a routine that picks qubits and gate order to cut idle time, plus calibration changes that IQM says halved some error rates.
The Espoo company ranks the result among the best on commercial hardware, a claim nobody outside IQM has checked.
Space
ESA Orders Four More Galileo Second Generation Satellites
ESA signed contracts on 23 and 26 October with Thales Alenia Space in Rome and Airbus in Ottobrunn for four more Galileo Second Generation satellites, acting for the EU and EUSPA. That takes the G2 order to 16, alongside 38 first-generation satellites.
No value was disclosed, and the new satellites are identical to the 12 already in production. The first G2 launch is planned for 2028, and the four new ones are due for delivery in 2031.
(ESA)
Materials & Manufacturing
MuRay Raises EUR 7.1 Million to See Inside Thick Metal
MuRay, which works from DESY in Hamburg and from Tallinn, raised EUR 7.1 million on 29 October, a year after a EUR 325,000 first round. First Momentum Ventures and Caelora, Marvel Fusion's investment arm, led EUR 3.5 million of equity; the rest is public money, including a Horizon Europe grant.
It sends controlled muon beams through dense metals, ceramics, and composites to build 3D images. X-rays stop at a few centimetres of steel, co-CEO Andi Hektor says, and many 3D-printed rocket engine and turbine parts are thicker than that.
A first real inspection, modelled with DLR, is planned for 2027 on DESY's electron beam. Its own laser-driven system is due in 2029, and MuRay names no paying customers yet.
(Tech.eu)
Robotics & Automation
Bleu Robotics Raises EUR 5 Million to Teach Humanoids From Ten Demonstrations
Bleu Robotics, founded in Paris in December 2025, raised a EUR 5 million pre-seed round on 29 October, co-led by Contrarian Ventures and OVNI Capital. Two founders are Inria research directors; the third ran assembly lines at Renault.
Its model infers the goal behind as few as ten operator demonstrations and runs on any humanoid. Bleu wants deployment to take an hour instead of months.
Interact Analysis estimates that only 10 per cent of the 20,000-plus humanoids built last year reached real work. London's Machenta, covered here on Thursday, raised USD 40 million on a similar pitch.
Semiconductors
ASM Will Reach Its 2030 Revenue Target in 2027
ASM now expects 2027 revenue above EUR 5.7 billion, up from the more than EUR 4.6 billion it forecast in July. That would hit its 2030 target three years early.
Third-quarter revenue rose 44 per cent to EUR 1.16 billion, driven by advanced logic and foundry. CEO Hichem M'Saad called ASM's supply chains "stretched", two weeks after ASML said its own expansion plan was already too small.
Applied Materials Takes Its Besi Stake to About 20 Per Cent
Applied Materials said on 27 October it will raise its stake in Besi to about 20 per cent. It calls the holding long-term and says it will not go higher or seek a board seat.
The two have co-developed hybrid bonding since 2020. The move follows Besi's record hybrid bonding orders, covered here last week, and comes as memory uptake slows and SemiAnalysis reports that ASML may build a rival tool.
One to Watch
Whether Brussels Clears Europe's Satellite Merger
Airbus, Thales, and Leonardo plan to merge their space businesses under the codename Bromo, creating a company with about EUR 6.5 billion in revenue and 25,000 staff. Leonardo says the partners will file in the next few weeks, and one insider expects the formal review to start in early 2027.
Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera is the actor to follow, and she has said the deal gets no special treatment. OHB threatens to sue if it is cleared without conditions, arguing that IRIS², the EUR 15.6 billion secure network, would be left with too few suppliers.