IQMa full stack quantum company from Finland, listed on the Nasdaq Thursday through a SPAC merger at a valuation of about $1.9 billion. But share prices did not explode. They spent most of the day below the IPO price — a warm welcome.
SPAC mergers are often not immediately popular with retail investors these days. But this flaw was arguably fueled by IQM’s own admission ad that “large-scale commercial traction of quantum computing technology may never happen.”
To be fair, this caveat applies to all quantum companies. However, this has not stopped the industry, including IQM, from gaining customers, who use the technology as it is today for tasks such as simulations and optimizations. IQM, which sells real physical computers as well as a cloud service, has customers such as the VTT Technical Research Center of Finland and the Leibniz Supercomputing Center in Germany.
“We sell computers in advanced supercomputing centers and data centers, and we sell computing time through the cloud,” CEO and co-founder Jan Goetz told TechCrunch.
Growing from eight clients in 2024 to 22 in 2025 is a fair cause for celebration in IQM circles, especially when two recent clients are from the private sector. But it also suggests that demand won’t scale until “quantum advantage” — when quantum chips begin to outperform classical computers for a wider range of complex and long-running tasks, unlocking use cases from biotech to fintech, while potentially upending crypto.
But no one, not even a company that makes quantum computers, can say when that might be.
That hasn’t stopped investors from doubling down on quant companies, public and private, further encouraging Recent Executive Orders by President Trump to accelerate the timeline for quantum. In response, the US Department of Energy (DOE) has committed to developing the “world’s first fault-tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computer” by 2028.
While this follows similar announcements from France, Germany and the UK, Trump’s orders carry extra weight for IQM, which recently established a quantum technology center in Maryland and developed a computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratorywhich is part of the DOE. “We can benefit immediately from this,” Goetz said.
Unlike other European unicorns, however, IQM does not shift its center of gravity to the other side of the Atlantic. Along with the IQMX index in the US, where most of its quant peers are listed, it is due debut tomorrow on Nasdaq Helsinkiwhere he expects continued support from the likes of Tesi, Finland’s sovereign wealth fund.
The history of IQM is inseparable from Finland. It was founded there in 2018 as a spin-off from Aalto University in Espoo, a tech and quantum hub near Helsinki, where two-thirds of its staff still work. But another hundred of its 420-strong team are based in Munich, with the rest split across locations to help the company on its global growth roadmap.
In its prospectus, IQM noted that this duality was addressed to RAAQ, the blank check company that helped IQM go public through a SPAC. “As evidenced by over €200 million in public support for IQM, European sovereign states and companies have supported IQM’s emergence as a prominent quantum computing company in Europe. IQM has also demonstrated its ability to operate outside of Europe,” according to the RAAQ board.
Despite the global ambitions, Goetz expressed pride that IQM became the first European quantum company to list in the US — within minutes of French rival Pasqal also announcing plans to go public through a SPAC. “It’s always nice to be first and to be a trailblazer, but ultimately it’s about long-term success,” Goetz said.
The operation will generate new liquidity for IQM — about 198 million euros after costs, or $226 million. But the company had already raised $300 million last September. “It’s a big hit that went up very shortly after Series B,” Goetz said. This also reflects that IQM’s main goal was to position itself more prominently in a race that is still full of unknowns.
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