Nord Quantique has secured a $10 million agreement extension for Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), building on its earlier selection when DARPA advanced eleven teams to Stage B. The award funds engineering milestones and risk-mitigation prototyping for the company’s bosonic quantum error correction (QEC) architecture, which uses continuous-variable bosonic codes in superconducting microwave cavities to aim for a 1:1 physical-to-logical qubit footprint. Under Stage B, Nord Quantique must deliver detailed R&D plans, identify dominant decoherence channels such as photon loss and phase-space diffusion, and demonstrate hardware that reduces state preparation and measurement (SPAM) and gate error rates below fault-tolerant thresholds. The extension follows DARPA’s structured program that evaluates whether emerging quantum hardware can achieve utility-scale performance by 2033 through independent verification and validation metrics. 1