By Mackenzie Tatananni
Xanadu Quantum Technologies defied a broad selloff in its trading debut, ending Friday's session at $11.50, up 15% from its opening price.
One would expect boundless enthusiasm on management's part after a day like that, but CEO Christian Weedbrook is maintaining a "business as usual" approach as he focuses on the company's long-term goals.
"There's an anti-climactic aspect to it," Weedbrook told Barron's. "It's something that we've been at, in the trenches, for months. We started preparations around seven or eight months ago and once you decide to go public, that's the goal."
Friday's move represented an 18% jump from the stock's previous closing price, after Xanadu went public through a business combination with a publicly traded blank check company.
The company first announced its intentions to merge with Crane Harbor Acquisition Corp. in November 2025. Friday's debut was a dual listing on both the Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange. The stock's strong performance Friday came as the tech-heavy Nasdaq slipped 2.2% and quantum peers IonQ and Rigetti Computing each lost more than 7%.
It has been a yearslong journey for Weedbrook, who founded the company nearly a decade ago while conducting postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto. Xanadu initially received support from the university's Creative Destruction Lab, followed by early seed funding from a group of Canadian venture firms.
Of course, Weedbrook and the rest of the Xanadu team couldn't anticipate the present-day market conditions. The Iran war has been front of mind for investors for the past month, and concerns over artificial-intelligence disruption to software have racked the sector and infected others, illustrating the power of sentiment.
Quantum stocks were notoriously volatile long before the recent bout of market instability. The previous session's gains were erased Monday as Xanadu sank nearly 32% to $7.83. However, Weedbrook doubled down on his view of quantum as a long-term investment, a view held by most bulls in the space.
"We've been very, very vocal on our aim to build a large-scale quantum computer by 2029 or 2030," Weedbrook said. "And so, within reason, it doesn't matter what the stock market is doing from now until then."
Most quantum computing developers, industry titans like International Business Machines included, are targeting the end of the decade for the delivery of commercial-grade machines. But Xanadu seeks to set itself apart through its use of photons, or light, as the basic units of information within its quantum systems.
The approach provides a distinct advantage: Xanadu's machines will be able to function at room temperature, eliminating the need for the bulky refrigerators needed to cool the components of most computers to absolute zero. This lends itself to scalable machines that are large enough to use practically.
In what can be seen as an endorsement of its technology, Xanadu already has big names in its corner. Crane Harbor provided $225 million from a trust account to finance the business combination, but an additional $275 million came from a cohort of investors including Advanced Micro Devices, which doubles as one of Xanadu's strategic partners.
Earlier this month, the companies teamed up on a hybrid computing experiment combining Xanadu's PennyLane software with AMD's high-performance computing infrastructure.
Xanadu has gained traction with other industry titans such as Lockheed Martin, BMW Group, and Volkswagen, with whom it has explored a range of quantum use cases, from defense to electric-vehicle batteries to manufacturing.
"Even though there's a huge amount of interest and hype, it still has to be solving a problem for customers," Weedbrook said of quantum computing. "I just see it as the next big tool that can solve customer problems, and hopefully people are willing to pay for it."
Write to Mackenzie Tatananni at mackenzie.tatananni@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 30, 2026 17:36 ET (21:36 GMT)
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