Amid enduring investor appetite for all things quantum, another European company in the space is graduating from the private markets. Just two weeks after Finnish quantum unicorn IQM said it was going public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), its French rival Pasqal is doing the same.
Accompanied by a separate $200 million private funding round, Pasqal’s SPAC deal will see it merging with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp II and subsequently being listed on the Nasdaq. The merger values Pasqal at $2 billion, pre-money.
Bleichroeder is backed by Michel Combes, a French telecom veteran who previously headed Vodafone and Alcatel-Lucent, and Andrew Gundlach, an investment advisor.
Pasqal is a full-stack quantum computing company taking on Big Tech. It generates annual revenue in the tens of millions from selling hardware, software and cloud services to labs and industry partners.
The SPAC deal comes as Pasqal’s North American counterparts, which took a similar route to the public markets, have seen their stocks surge in recent months. U.S. markets offer companies like Pasqal the sort of scale and revenue multiples that are harder to come by at home in Europe, not to mention the cash they need for the long journey to fully realize the potential of quantum computing.
But Pasqal (like IQM) is planning a dual US-European listing. The Nasdaq float is scheduled for this year, and the company will prepare to list on Euronext later in 2026 or 2027.
The dual-listing could be one way Pasqal is trying to reassure its French backers. Bpifrance, France’s public investment bank, is a key shareholder, and will remain active both in Pasqal’s cap table and the company’s board, according to a press release.
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Pasqal stressed that it expects to remain a French legal entity headquartered in Palaiseau, a suburb of Paris that houses a cluster of academic institutions, as well as industrial research centers run by Pasqal’s clients, energy giant EDF and defense company Thales. The quantum computing company also intends to appoint “a new non-executive chair of French nationality” to its board.
An investor presentation from Bleichroeder indicates that Combes will serve as “lead independent director of Pasqal” after the deal closes — though this appointment may not be received completely positively in France.
In 2015, current French President Emmanuel Macron publicly rebuked Combes for stepping down as Alcatel-Lucent’s CEO before a takeover of the ailing Alcatel by Nokia had closed. Combes’ exit package proved so controversial that it was eventually reduced by half.
Combes’ subsequent moves have gone some way toward rehabilitating his reputation in French tech circles. After replacing Marcelo Claure as Sprint’s CEO, he headed SoftBank Group International, where he championed French scale-ups like Swile. But he left that position after only five months amid a wave of departures in 2022.
Pasqal is no stranger to executive reshuffles. Buried in the announcement is the fact that the company’s former executive chairman, Wasiq Bokhari, is now its CEO. And Loïc Henriet, who started off as its CTO, then moved up to a co-CEO role and later on was its sole CEO, is back as CTO again.
Reaffirming its commitment to France may bring more intangible benefits for Pasqal, too. The company is telling taxpayers that its growth will create highly qualified jobs in the country, where it plans to hire 50 people over the next 18 months. Also, not being an American company in the current geopolitical climate has a good chance of opening doors, as French AI lab Mistral AI has found.
But no company can last long without a good product. The race is intense in quantum computing since competing approaches to the tech hold equal promise. IQM, for instance, bets on superconducting qubits, while Pasqal follows the neutral atom path championed by its co-founder, physics Nobel laureate Alain Aspect.
This technical foundation will play a key role for Pasqal, which plans to keep investing heavily in R&D to develop a fault-tolerant quantum computer by the end of the decade. Such advancements will be essential to unlocking applications in areas like drug discovery, healthcare, and cybersecurity.
The SPAC transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2026, and Pasqal expects a pro-forma market capitalization of approximately $2.6 billion, giving the company cash to put towards its goal of doubling production capacity within 24 months.
The $200 million private funding round saw investments from Parkway, Quanta Computer, LG Electronics and CMA CGM. The company’s backers include the European Innovation Council Fund, Series B lead investor Temasek, Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Ventures, and ISAI.