100 billion - The largest quantum IPO of the night was celebrated with a ringing bell

Nowadays, emotions have never been so intense:

In the first month of the year, there were four overseas quantum IPOs. Not long ago, Guoyi Quantum also successfully passed the review on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board and has a full schedule of listing dates. "In less than half a year, the valuation has increased several times." The investor told us about the financing boom of quantum this year.

Perhaps at this moment, the ticket to the post-Moore era is getting closer.

Let's start with the story of Quantinuum.

Khan, an atypical tech entrepreneur - with a background in banking, he has run a magazine and managed a football team. In 2015, he founded Cambridge Quantum Computing Company, focusing on quantum software and cybersecurity, with the goal of developing tools that can commercialize quantum technology.

Honeywell is an industrial giant with a history of over a hundred years. It has a department called Honeywell Quantum Solutions, which specializes in high-performance ion trap quantum hardware. Both companies recognized the necessity of integrating software and hardware, and thus, in 2021, they merged, giving rise to Quantinuum.

Quantinuum has adopted the ion hydride approach and released the quantum computer Helios in November last year. According to Quantinuum, this is the "most precise commercial quantum computer" in the world - it has 98 fully connected physical quantum bits, with single and double quantum bit gate fidelities of 99.9975% and 99.921% respectively.

Perhaps no one would have imagined that in the future, Quantinuum would become the world's most valued quantum unicorn.

In January 2024, Quantinuum announced the completion of its first round of financing of $300 million, with a valuation reaching $5 billion. JPMorgan Chase was the lead investor, while Mitsui & Co., Amgen and Honeywell participated. They are mostly the partners of Quantinuum.

What was particularly impressive was that in September last year, Nvidia's venture capital arm NVentures, Quanta Computer, QED Investors, MESH, Korea Investment Partners, and a number of existing shareholders jointly invested 6 billion US dollars, doubling the valuation to 10 billion US dollars.

Just last month, Quantinuum received a significant cheque - the US government announced that it would provide a total of $2.013 billion in grants to 9 quantum computing companies, and Quantinuum is expected to receive $100 million of this funding.

Currently, Quantinuum's business scope covers areas such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, drug development, and materials science. It plans to launch its first commercial system, Sol, next year, and introduce the general-purpose quantum computer "Apollo" in 2029.

In terms of financial data, the company's revenue in 2025 was 30.9 million US dollars, with a net loss of 192.6 million US dollars, but its market value exceeded 15 billion US dollars - in other words, investors were willing to pay an excessive premium of over 400 times for this computer under development.

After the IPO, the former employer Honeywell will still retain approximately 49.1% of the voting rights of Quantinuum, while Cambridge Quantum holds 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 holdings will exceed 2 billion US dollars.

Quantum begins the process of going public through an IPO.

One can't help but feel that the quantum technology sector has been quiet for far too long.

The clock rolls back to around 2021. Four quantum computing companies - IonQ, D-Wave, Rigetti, and QCi - successively went public on the Nasdaq, quickly achieving high valuations and garnering a lot of attention. Subsequently, there was a three-year gap, during which the industry fell into a period of silence.

But things have quietly changed.

This year, three quantum computing companies went public in the first few months - in February, Infleqtion, a neutral atom quantum computing company, listed on the NYSE. Shortly after, Xanadu became the world's first pure optical quantum computing company to go public, and Horizon Quantum also quickly listed on the Nasdaq. Even in the second half of the year, the schedule was filled with listings of quantum computing companies.

For a moment, it felt as if it were a completely different world.

Most of these IPOs were completed through SPACs. As they can to some extent alleviate the revenue shortcomings of early-stage technology companies, SPACs have quickly become an excellent channel for quantum enterprises to raise funds.

The big players naturally couldn't let this opportunity slip by. Take NVIDIA for example. It once played a key role in bringing about a dramatic reversal - just a year ago, Huang Renxun publicly stated that the industry was still 15 to 30 years away from creating a "truly useful quantum computer", but two months later, he reversed his pessimistic prediction. Just six months later, NVIDIA's venture capital department had already invested in three quantum computing companies: Quantinuum, QuEra, and PsiQuantum.

Not long ago, NVIDIA released the first open-source quantum AI model, Ising. It significantly reduced the quantum calibration time from days to hours, greatly accelerating the practical application process of quantum computing and making industry standardization facilities come into view.

"Launching a quantum computer is like launching an AI. It needs to be done precisely. Just like when laying out the groundwork for AI before the advent of ChatGPT, one cannot prematurely set up defenses for 15 years, nor can one lag behind the trend for 15 years." Horizons Quantum's founder, Joe Fitzsimons, said so.

Let's turn our attention back to the domestic scene. The quantum competition is equally intense.

The earliest example is Guodun Quantum, which went public on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board in 2020 and became the "first quantum communication company". Its latest market value is nearly 60 billion yuan. The core team also comes from the University of Science and Technology of China, including Pan Jianwei, who is known as the "father of quantum", and there are also star institutions such as Junchuan Capital, Guoyuan Venture Capital, Hongfu Investment, and Weiqian Investment behind it.

Not long ago, Gu Yi Quantum's IPO on the STAR Market was approved. "The first company in China to offer quantum precision measurement services" is just around the corner. Binyuan Quantum also initiated IPO counseling in September last year. Coupled with the highly anticipated companies like Bose Quantum, QuantuTech, and Turing Quantum, the list is getting longer and longer.

"The quantum investors are about to make it ashore."

An investor who has been closely following the quantum sector shared with the investment community: Currently, there are approximately three tiers of quantum-related projects in China. Some had a valuation of around 80-90 million yuan at the end of last year, but their valuations have increased several times in just half a year. "After the policy was released, quantum was precisely included in the top position of future industries. The primary market basically all rushed to invest."

Just before the outbreak

The critical moment is approaching imperceptibly.

A few days later, the team from the University of Science and Technology of China, in collaboration with several other institutions, released the "Jiuzhang No.4" quantum computing prototype. They were able to manipulate and detect the quantum states of up to 3,050 photons for the first time, once again breaking the world record in optical quantum information technology - solving a specific mathematical problem only takes 25 microseconds, which is over a billion billion billion billion times faster than supercomputers.

One aspect is that the classical computing architecture has reached its limits.

Under the AI wave, the demand for computing power has shown an exponential increase. The once-prevailing Moore's Law has been extended to 30 months, and traditional data centers are facing bottlenecks. At this point, quantum computing, which has advantages such as superposition and entanglement, brings a highly imaginative potential space.

"If you want to simulate nature, you must use quantum mechanics." This was Feynman's judgment back then. Traditional computers represent the world using 0s and 1s, while quantum theory employs superposition states - exactly the same as nature. This is why quantum computers have an unparalleled natural advantage in protein simulation, material discovery, and chemical reaction calculations.

The direct manifestation is the ability to handle a large number of possibilities simultaneously. For specific problems, the speed of quantum computers can be exponentially faster than that of traditional computers.

However, these remarkable properties are highly demanding and are highly susceptible to external environmental interference. Just to prepare quantum states that can be used for computing, there are numerous technical routes such as superconductivity, optical quantum, ion traps, neutral atoms, topology, etc. It is still uncertain which one will be the first to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computing. This easily leads 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 divergence of approaches, it's impossible to conduct technical verification and make judgments. Therefore, investing in this sector is quite challenging." The aforementioned investor told the investment community.

Furthermore, due to the fragile nature of the environment in which quantum operations occur, issues such as improving the stability of qubits, preparing a sufficient scale, and enhancing the software ecosystem are all currently facing us. And what technical indicators the "adequate quantum" should reach directly determines the time anchor for industrialization.

But just as the earliest steam engines were ridiculed as "inferior to horses", and large models a few years ago were regarded as expensive toys for their nonsense, it is hard to say that today's quantum technology is not standing on the threshold of dawn.

"Frontier technologies usually take many years to be commercially viable on a large scale. This is quite normal." An investor told us that there is already a glimmer of hope in the quantum field. "Some products could be launched on the market in three years."

At this moment, venture capital becomes particularly valuable. Currently, capital is pouring into this sector in an unprecedentedly intense manner. The logic is clear - before any competitors reach the finish line, bet on the one who is most likely to cross the finish line first.