By Mackenzie Tatananni
Quantum investors have faced a whirlwind few months, marked by a string of public listings, technical breakthroughs, and a warning that quantum's disruptive power may come to fruition sooner than anticipated.
But there's even more in store. Enter Pasqal.
The French quantum start-up is set to go public in the second half of the year. Pasqal has agreed to merge with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II, a special purpose acquisition company, in a transaction valuing the start-up at $2 billion pre-money.
The go-forward company will be listed on the Nasdaq, signaling Pasqal's formal entry into the U.S. market. Pasqal, however, has been setting down roots in the country for a while, as a member of International Business Machines' Quantum Network and an Nvidia collaborator.
"This is a very important first step for us to become a truly global company and to get the access to capital, and the depth that is required for us to be that global company," CEO Wasiq Bokhari said in an interview with Barron's.
In taking that step, Pasqal will be going head-to-head with other publicly traded players including recent entrants Infleqtion and Xanadu, which made their trading debuts this year. However, Bokhari believes the company's differentiated technology -- coupled with its reputation as a leader in Europe -- will be enough to set the company apart.
Europe is widely regarded as a hotbed of quantum innovation. The region accounts for almost a third of the world's quantum companies, ahead of both the U.S. and China. Where it falls behind is in patents -- China overwhelmingly leads on that front, followed by the U.S.
Within Europe, France has attempted to position itself as a pioneer. The country launched a 1.8 billion-euro ($2 billion), five-year plan in 2021 to situate France among the top three global leaders in quantum technology.
Pasqal's upcoming public debut is a step in the right direction, indicating that France is one of just a few countries that have successfully scaled the nascent technology into market-ready assets.
"There is a very long history of excellence in optics and atomic physics in France, and so we are really tapping into this tradition," Bokhari told Barron's.
The company's claim to fame is its founding team. Physicist Alain Aspect was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2022 for his experiments with entangled photons, the framework Pasqal was built upon. The company's spun off France's Institut d'Optique Graduate School in 2019. Bokhari came on board in 2023 and was appointed executive chairman last year.
Pasqal's quantum systems use neutral atom technology, in which individual atoms are trapped and manipulated in a vacuum by laser beams. These atoms act as qubits -- the basic units of information in a quantum computer -- that can operate in both analog and digital modes.
"When we use neutral atoms, they essentially connect to each other using light," Bokhari explained. "We have no wiring between neutral atoms. As a consequence of that, it's easily scalable, so we can have tens of thousands of qubits in each quantum computer."
The computers' unique properties require less power, in the neighborhood of several kilowatts -- comparable to a standard kitchen oven. Pasqal's systems also operate at room temperature, which makes them an ideal fit for data centers, where Bokhari envisions them working alongside GPUs and CPUs.
But that's in years to come. For now, the company is focused on building up its presence in the U.S., which includes the selection of Chicago as the home of its domestic headquarters. The company has vowed to invest more than $65 million in the location, envisioning the creation of 50 full-time jobs.
It's a worthwhile investment, Bokhari says. "The U.S. constitutes a very large fraction of the global market, around 20%, so we've always planned to make sure we have a very robust presence in the U.S.," the CEO said. "It's just a natural execution of that realization for us."
The company has a separate headquarters in Canada and key customers scattered across several other countries. Pasqal partnered with early investor Saudi Aramco to deploy Saudi Arabia's first quantum computer last year. In South Korea, Pasqal counts LG Electronics as a major strategic partner that has been working with the company since November.
Like its pure-play peers, Pasqal is in the early stages of commercializing its systems and has yet to generate a profit. But its upcoming public debut signals its foray into a market where the use cases for the technology are gradually emerging. Pasqal is one to watch.
"We want people to use those machines to solve important business problems," Bokhari said. "That's what we would like to offer, and that's how we would like to introduce ourselves."
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
April 08, 2026 03:00 ET (07:00 GMT)
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