French Quantum Company Pasqal Starts Trading on Nasdaq
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden
Pasqal just started trading on Nasdaq after a SPAC merger. The French quantum company says it now has about $360 million to push hardware, software and sales.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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Pasqal is now a Nasdaq company. Its shares began trading today under the ticker PSQL, with warrants under PSQLW, after a merger with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II. The SPAC deal had already been approved by shareholders last Tuesday, and Pasqal says it finished the process with roughly $360 million in cash.
That cash has a job to do. Pasqal says it will go into manufacturing, a wider rollout of its quantum processing units, work toward fault-tolerant quantum computing, its cloud and software platform, tighter links with classical high-performance computing, and more sales muscle. CEO Wasiq Bokhari framed the listing as a way to grow faster, pointing to systems already running in real environments and to processors that are connected to customers’ existing computing setups.
The company’s pitch is unusual even by quantum standards. Founded in 2019 in Palaiseau, outside Paris, Pasqal works with neutral atoms, trapping individual atoms in laser-made lattices and using them as qubits. It says that approach is energy efficient, scalable, and able to run in standard data center conditions. Seven QPUs are deployed today, three more are in production, and more than 25 commercial and research applications are running through its cloud access in areas including energy, financial services and materials science. One system is at the Jülich research center in Germany.
Pasqal had been valued at $2 billion in its last funding round, and the SPAC combination valued it at roughly that level before the cash came in, with a pro forma market capitalization of about $2.6 billion. Around the same time, it raised about $200 million from private investors including Parkway, Quanta Computer, LG Electronics and CMA CGM. The company says it will keep its headquarters and legal home in France, with Bpifrance on the board and a secondary Euronext listing announced. There is also a Saudi angle now: Pasqal and Eleven Ventures are setting up Pasqal Arabia to deploy quantum systems in the kingdom and the wider region.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of listing quantum companies keep needing: real hardware, real customers, and a pile of cash before the hype gets a chance to do all the work. The catch is the same one with most deep tech stories — a $2 billion valuation is easy; broad commercial traction is the part that tends to show up late, if at all.
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