MW Quantinuum raises $1.68 billion in IPO that seeks to give quantum computing more street cred

By Britney Nguyen

Quantinuum is pursuing a traditional IPO, whereas many other quantum players have gone the SPAC route

Shares of quantum computing company Quantinuum will begin trading on Thursday.

Quantum computing has made strides toward commercial adoption in recent years, and a buzzy initial public offering will test just how confident investors are in the emerging technology.

Quantinuum (QNT), a full-stack quantum-computing platform, will see its shares begin trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "QNT" on Thursday. Late Wednesday, the company priced its IPO at $60 a share, meaning that the deal raised $1.68 billion after 28 million shares were sold.

That Quantinuum is taking the public-listing route and not going through a special-purpose acquisition company as many of its publicly traded quantum peers have done "is a meaningful step towards giving the space a bit more credibility and visibility," Wedbush analyst Antoine Legault told MarketWatch. The IPO will allow Quantinuum to position itself as "a premier, institutional-grade quantum asset because it's differentiating its go-to-market approach," he added.

For context, IonQ $(IONQ)$ has a current market capitalization of about $25.5 billion, while D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) is smaller, with a valuation of $10 billion. Going forward, investors will be debating which companies in the space are overvalued and which are undervalued, Legault said.

Following a fundraising round in September, Quantinuum was valued at $10 billion.

"Investors are putting a high premium on growth," Matt Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, told MarketWatch. That includes next-generation technologies that are still years away from turning a profit or driving meaningful revenue, he said.

Additionally, "rapid technological and societal change is driving interest in frontier tech," Kennedy said in emailed comments.

Honeywell Quantum Solutions and Cambridge Quantum combined in 2021 to form Quantinuum, and the company counts Honeywell $(HON)$ as a strategic customer and partner.

See more: This new quantum stock could debut with a valuation of nearly $13 billion

While traditional computers use binary 0's and 1's, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, that have far more processing power thanks to superposition, or the ability for qubits to be any combination of 0 and 1 at the same time. That means quantum computers can be used to solve far more complex problems that are nearly impossible for regular computers - and at a faster pace. However, qubits, which are usually electrons or photons, work in a fragile environment, meaning there are often errors, especially when scaling up.

Quantinuum CEO Rajeeb Hazra said in the company's prospectus that it is "executing a roadmap to the first commercial-scale, fully fault-tolerant quantum computer before the end of the decade."

The company's quantum processing units "produce data that is extremely difficult - if not impossible - to produce classically," it said in its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That puts it at an advantage in the current artificial-intelligence era, the company said, because it can "provide novel, high-value data that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive or altogether unattainable" for training models.

Willy Lee, a principal at venture-capital firm SuRo Capital $(SSSS)$, told MarketWatch that Quantinuum's IPO comes at a time when companies surrounding AI are getting a boost from the trend.

Renaissance's Kennedy said quantum computing is closer than it has ever been to widespread commercialization. Therefore, compared to previous public quantum debuts, this one "feels less speculative." The company is also likely "benefiting from a scarcity premium" considering there are currently not many ways to get exposure to quantum in the market, Kennedy said.

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For the March quarter, Quantinuum saw net revenue of $5.2 million and a net loss of $136.6 million. For the full year ended Dec. 31, 2025, the company's net revenue was $30.9 million, up from $23 million the previous year. Its net loss for the year was $192.6 million, compared to a net loss of $144.1 million in 2024.

-Britney Nguyen

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June 03, 2026 20:57 ET (00:57 GMT)

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