100 billion, the biggest quantum IPO of last night has rung the bell
The quantum race has begun to explode.
Yesterday, Quantinuum, the world's largest quantum unicorn, officially listed on the NASDAQ. The issue price was $60 per share, raising $1.68 billion. It opened 13% higher, with a market value of over $15 billion (approximately RMB 100 billion), creating the largest IPO in the quantum field to date.
Currently, the enthusiasm has never been so high:
There have been four overseas quantum IPOs at the beginning of the year. Not long ago, Guoyi Quantum also successfully passed the review on the Science and Technology Innovation Board. The IPO schedules are full of quantum companies. "The valuation has tripled in less than half a year," an investor told us about the prosperous financing situation of the quantum industry this year.
Perhaps at this moment, the ticket to the post-Moore era is getting closer.
The world's largest quantum unicorn rings the bell, with a market value of 100 billion
Let's start with the story of Quantinuum.
Khan, an atypical tech entrepreneur - from a banking background, has run a magazine and managed a football team. In 2015, he founded Cambridge Quantum Computing, focusing on quantum software and network security, aiming to develop tools that can commercialize quantum technology.
Honeywell is an industrial giant with a history of over a hundred years, with a high-performance ion trap quantum hardware department, Honeywell Quantum Solutions. Both sides realized the necessity of software and hardware integration. So, in 2021, the two companies merged, and Quantinuum was born.
Quantinuum follows the ion trap route and released the quantum computer Helios in November last year. According to Quantinuum, this is the "most accurate commercial quantum computer" in the world - with 98 fully connected physical qubits, and the single and double qubit gate fidelities are 99.9975% and 99.921% respectively.
Perhaps no one would have thought that Quantinuum would become the world's most highly valued quantum unicorn in the future.
In January 2024, Quantinuum announced the completion of a $300 million Series A financing, with a valuation of $5 billion. The lead investor was JPMorgan Chase, and Mitsui & Co., Amgen, and Honeywell participated. They are basically all partners of Quantinuum.
Notably, in September last year, NVentures, the venture capital arm of NVIDIA, Quanta Computer, QED Investors, MESH, Korea Investment Partners, and a group of old shareholders jointly invested $600 million, doubling the valuation to $10 billion.
Just last month, Quantinuum received a significant check - the US government announced that it would provide a total of $2.013 billion in grants to nine quantum computing companies, and Quantinuum is expected to receive $100 million.
Currently, Quantinuum's business scope covers fields such as artificial intelligence, network security, drug research and development, and materials science. It plans to launch its first commercial system, Sol, next year and a general-purpose quantum computer, "Apollo," in 2029.
In terms of financial data, the company's revenue in 2025 was $30.9 million, with a net loss of $192.6 million, but the market value exceeded $15 billion - in other words, investors have to pay a premium of over 400 times for this computer under development.
After the IPO, Honeywell, the former parent company, will still retain approximately 49.1% of the voting rights in Quantinuum, and Cambridge Quantum will hold approximately 32.5% of the shares. Ilyas Khan, the founder of Cambridge Quantum, remains the largest individual shareholder. Based on the issue price, the value of his shares will exceed $2 billion.
Quantum companies are lining up for IPOs
One can't help but sigh that the quantum race has been dormant for too long.
Looking back to around 2021, four quantum computing companies, IonQ, D-Wave, Rigetti, and QCi, successively listed on the NASDAQ, quickly gaining high valuations and a lot of attention. Subsequently, there was a three-year hiatus, and the industry was once dormant.
But the situation has quietly changed.
At the beginning of this year, three quantum companies went public - in February, Infleqtion, a neutral atom quantum computing company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Soon after, Xanadu became the world's first listed pure photonic quantum computing company, and Horizon Quantum also quickly listed on the NASDAQ. Even the schedules for the second half of the year are full of quantum companies.
It feels like a different world all of a sudden.
Most of these IPOs were completed through SPACs. Since SPACs can exempt early-stage technology companies from revenue shortfalls to a certain extent, they have become an excellent channel for quantum companies to raise funds.
The giants naturally don't want to miss out on this opportunity. For example, NVIDIA created a dramatic reversal - a year ago, Jensen Huang publicly stated that the industry was still 15 to 30 years away from building a "truly useful quantum computer." Two months later, he retracted his pessimistic prediction. Just half a year later, NVentures, NVIDIA's venture capital arm, invested in three quantum computing companies, Quantinuum, QuEra, and PsiQuantum.
Not long ago, NVIDIA released its first open-source quantum AI model, Ising, which compressed the quantum calibration time from days to hours, significantly accelerating the practical application of quantum computing and making the industry's standardized facilities more visible.
"Investing in quantum is like investing in AI. You need to be just right, like investing in AI before the emergence of ChatGPT. You can't stand guard for 15 years too early, nor can you lag behind the trend for 15 years," said Joe Fitzsimons, the founder of Horizon Quantum.
Let's turn our attention to China. The quantum competition is equally fierce.
It dates back to Guodun Quantum, which listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board in 2020, creating the "first quantum communication stock," with a latest market value of nearly 60 billion yuan. The core team also comes from the University of Science and Technology of China, including Pan Jianwei, known as the "father of quantum." There are also well-known institutions such as Legend Capital, Guoyuan Venture Capital, Hongfu Investment, and Weiqian Investment behind it.
Not long ago, Guoyi Quantum passed the IPO review on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, and the "first quantum precision measurement stock" is within reach. Benyuan Quantum also started IPO counseling in September last year. Coupled with promising companies such as Bose Quantum, Liangxuan Technology, and Turing Quantum, the list is getting longer.
"Quantum investors are about to see returns."
An investor who has been closely following the quantum race shared with the investment community: Currently, there are approximately three tiers of quantum projects in China. Some projects that were valued at 800 to 900 million yuan at the end of last year have tripled in value in just half a year. "After the policy was released, quantum was included at the top of the future industries, and the primary market is basically chasing after these investments."
On the verge of explosion
The critical moment is approaching.
At the beginning of May, Zhongke Kuyuan, Bose Quantum, and Benyuan Quantum successively released new-generation quantum computer systems, with the number of qubits ranging from 180, 200, to 1000. These three companies represent the three physical routes of neutral atoms, photonic quantum, and superconductivity, and their significance as a vane is self-evident.
A few days later, a team from the University of Science and Technology of China, in collaboration with multiple institutions, released the "Jiuzhang 4" quantum computing prototype, which for the first time manipulated and detected the quantum states of up to 3050 photons, once again breaking the world record in photonic quantum information technology - it only takes 25 microseconds to solve specific mathematical problems, which is trillions of times faster than supercomputers.
The background is that the classical computing architecture has reached its limit.
Under the wave of AI, the demand for computing power has increased exponentially. The once-prevailing Moore's Law has been extended to 30 months, and traditional data centers are facing bottlenecks. At this time, quantum computing, with its advantages such as superposition and entanglement, brings a highly imaginative potential space.
"If you want to simulate nature, you have to use quantum mechanics," Feynman judged at that time. Traditional computers use 0 and 1 to describe the world, while quantum theory uses superposition states - which are exactly the same as nature. This is why quantum computers have an unparalleled natural advantage in protein simulation, material discovery, and chemical reaction calculation.
The direct manifestation is the ability to process a large number of possibilities simultaneously. For specific problems, quantum computers can be exponentially faster than traditional computers.
However, the conditions for these amazing characteristics are very demanding, and they are easily affected by the external environment. Just to prepare a quantum state for computing, there are many technical routes such as superconductivity, photonic quantum, ion traps, neutral atoms, and topology. It is still uncertain which route will be the first to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computing. This can easily lead to the dispersion and waste of industrial resources.
"At present, one major feeling is that you know there are excellent investment opportunities in this industry, but due to the early-stage route differentiation, it is impossible to conduct technical verification and judgment, and it is quite difficult to invest," the above-mentioned investor told the investment community.
In addition, due to the fragile environment in which quantum operations take place, the problems of how to improve qubit stability, prepare a sufficient scale, and improve the software ecosystem are right in front of us. And what technical indicators the "usable quantum" should reach directly determines the time anchor for industrialization.
But just as the earliest steam engines were mocked as "inferior to horses" and large models were regarded as expensive toys for their nonsense a few years ago, it's hard to say that today's quantum technology isn't on the verge of dawn.
"It's normal for frontier technologies to take many years to achieve large-scale commercialization," an investor told us. Currently, there is a glimmer of hope in the quantum field, and "some products can be launched into the market in three years."
At this moment, venture capital is particularly precious. Currently, capital is pouring into this race in an unprecedentedly intensive manner, and the logic is clear - before any competitor reaches the finish line, bet on the one most likely to cross it first.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Investment Community" (ID: pedaily2012), author: Yu Mengying, published by 36Kr with authorization.