Pasqal’s Nasdaq Debut Meets a Risk Reckoning

French quantum computing firm Pasqal debuted on Nasdaq via SPAC merger, surging to $19.11 before plummeting ~58% to ~$7.77. Valued at $2 billion pre-financing with $360M cash, Pasqal reports rising revenue but faces valuation challenges typical of capital-intensive quantum firms. Experts note the sector is shifting from physics experiments to scalable engineering, yet public market volatility highlights the venture-like risk and liquidity pressures these companies now face.

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Pasqal received an enthusiastic welcome from investors when the French neutral atom quantum computing company began trading on Nasdaq on Aug. 28 after completing a merger with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II.

Bleichroeder was a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), a publicly traded shell company created to identify a private business to merge with and take public; it ultimately selected Pasqal. Bleichroeder shares closed at $9.79 on August 27, the day before Pasqal began trading under its own ticker. After the combination took effect, the stock closed at $19.11 on its first day as Pasqal. The enthusiasm faded quickly. By the following week, the shares were trading at about $8, roughly 58% below their first-day close. They have remained near that level since, closing at $7.77 on September 15.

The decline says little by itself about whether Pasqal’s technology will ultimately succeed. But it illustrates the difficulty investors face in valuing quantum companies that need industrial-scale capital today while much of their commercial opportunity remains in the future.

Pasqal now has roughly $360 million in cash available to pursue that scale-up. According to public filings, the company has seven quantum processing units (QPUs) deployed and three more in production. It reported €16.5 million (~$19 million) in commercial revenue in 2025, up from €3.5 million (~$4 million) in 2024, while the transaction valued Pasqal at $2 billion before the new financing.

Pasqal CEO Wasiq Bokhari agreed to answer EE Times questions about the company’s commercialization plans, capital requirements, and transition to the public markets, but did not follow through with responses.

From physics experiment to product

According to Sean Sullivan, co-founder and CTO of quantum networking company memQ, the hundreds of millions of dollars now being raised by quantum companies reflect a genuine shift in the challenges facing the industry. “It’s about turning what have traditionally been like physics experiments into products that you can actually buy and then use,” he told EE Times.

That means replacing collections of specialized laboratory equipment with integrated systems built around components that can be reliably manufactured, packaged, interconnected, and supplied at scale.

According to Pasqal’s investor materials, its manufacturing facilities in France and Canada can produce up to 13 QPUs annually, subject to full staffing and parts availability. The company also reports that its latest-generation machine has achieved 1,024 trapped atoms.

Sullivan said investment across the quantum sector is increasingly flowing toward fabrication, packaging, integrated control systems, supply chains, and other relatively mundane engineering problems rather than purely fundamental physics. The physics has not disappeared, he cautioned. But the questions are changing from whether quantum systems can work at all toward how to engineer them reliably and economically.

Money helps because it lets companies iterate faster. They can run more fabrication cycles, operate more development systems in parallel, and test more approaches. “It just gets you more shots on goal to engineer around some challenges,” Sullivan said.

But capital cannot make fundamental physical constraints disappear. That leaves investors financing several competing quantum architectures before it’s clear which approaches will prove easiest to scale commercially.

Venture risk in public stock

For Hamiz Awan, founder and CEO of Plutus21 Capital, today’s publicly traded quantum companies look less like conventional public equities and more like venture investments. “Even though these are public companies, it’s just a venture investment,” he told EE Times.

Current financial performance alone cannot explain many quantum company valuations, he said. Investors are instead paying for technical progress, intellectual property, scarce engineering talent, and essentially an option on a potentially enormous future market.

That also means accepting venture-style probabilities: Several companies and architectures may receive substantial financing while only a small number ultimately generate outsized returns. Awan said he believes technology is only part of what is driving money into quantum. Liquidity, momentum, and fear of missing the next major technology cycle after AI are also important.

“Most investors understand momentum,” he said, adding that he doubts most have enough technical knowledge to judge the relative merits and maturity of the competing quantum approaches. Pasqal’s first weeks of trading illustrate how quickly that momentum can reverse.

Public markets also impose a different discipline from private financing. “As soon as you become a public company, if somebody disagrees with you or your projections, they have a very clean way of betting against you,” Awan said. “For the first time, these quantum companies are seeing levered selling pressure from people that are betting against them.”

At the same time, public shares give capital-intensive companies a potentially powerful financing tool. Stock can be used to raise additional capital, compensate employees, or finance acquisitions.

What counts as commercial progress?

If stock market enthusiasm is unreliable, the harder question is what investors should use to measure progress. Philip van den Berge, founder and CEO of stock analysis platform Intrinsiqq, argued that investors should look beyond quantum company partnership announcements and focus on transactions that demonstrate customers are actually paying for and using the technology.

“What I’m mostly looking for is contracts, machines,” van den Berge told EE Times. What matters most, he said, is whether customers actually take delivery and then “buy a second one.”

The repeat sale is particularly significant, he said. A first quantum system may be purchased for experimentation. A customer returning for another suggests the first deployment provided enough value to justify additional spending.

Pasqal’s commercial revenue provides some evidence of movement in that direction. Commercial revenue rose from €3.5 million in 2024 (~$4 million) to €16.5 million (~$19 million) in 2025. Pasqal also reported more than €66 million (~$76.2 million) in booked and awarded business as of March 2026, although the company indicated that figure includes grants.

Despite its falling share price, however, Pasqal remains valued at many times its current sales. At around $8 a share, its market capitalization of roughly $1.7 billion equates to about 89 times its 2025 commercial revenue. That multiple reflects expectations of a much larger future business rather than Pasqal’s present sales.

Capital buys time

The final capital position was also substantially below the level contemplated when the transaction was announced. In March, Pasqal and Bleichroeder projected more than $600 million in gross proceeds, a figure that included existing Pasqal cash and assumed no SPAC redemptions. When the transaction closed on August 27, Pasqal reported approximately $360 million in cash available.

Van den Berge cautioned against estimating how long that money will last simply by comparing it with historical losses. Manufacturing costs and other spending may rise as Pasqal scales, while cash flow is a better measure of capital consumption than accounting losses.

For Awan, the more important question is what Pasqal accomplishes with the money. “A lot of times, the capital that’s raised is honestly just to keep the lights on,” he said.

If companies remain primarily in experimentation mode several years after raising hundreds of millions of dollars, he argued, the capital may have extended their runway without proving that they have scalable businesses.

Pasqal’s share price decline does not settle the question of whether neutral atom quantum computing will succeed. But it does show how difficult public markets find it to price that possibility.

Pasqal now has hundreds of millions of dollars to move its technology toward industrial scale. The harder task is proving that industrial scale can become commercial scale.

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