On Friday, a new ticker appeared on Nasdaq: PSQL. French neutral-atom quantum computing company Pasqal's first trading day after its SPAC merger. It closed at $19.11 versus the shell company's previous close of $9.79 — a first-day gain of +95.2%, nearly doubling, before giving back about 10% after hours.
The road to listing
- 2026-01-08 — Shell company Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II completes IPO
- 2026-08-05 — SEC declares F-4 registration effective
- 2026-08-25 — SPAC shareholders vote to approve
- 2026-08-27 — Merger completed; roughly $360 million in cash
- 2026-08-28 — Lists on Nasdaq as PSQL; closes at $19.11
- Aug 24 — US Treasury forms a post-quantum cryptography preparedness working group under Executive Order 14412
- Aug 25 — NSF announces over $290 million for eight quantum research institutes
- Aug 26 — IBM completes acquisition of HRL Laboratories (bought from Boeing and GM, gaining silicon spin qubits and quantum sensing)
- Aug 28 — Pasqal rings the bell
- Pasqal merger completion announcement
- The Quantum Insider debut recap
- Reuters, Aug 28
- US Treasury announcement
- NSF eight institutes
- IBM-HRL
Who is this company
Pasqal spun out of Institut d'Optique in 2019; co-founders include Alain Aspect, the 2022 Nobel laureate in physics known for the Bell inequality experiments. Its technology uses optical tweezer arrays to trap neutral atoms: over 1,110 atoms trapped simultaneously and a 1,024-atom defect-free array. The company currently offers analog quantum computing, with fault tolerance on the roadmap. It has 7 QPUs deployed and 3 more in production, with 4 located at national supercomputing centers in France, Germany, Italy, and Canada. Customers include Aramco (reservoir simulation), Crédit Agricole CIB, and LG Electronics. 2025 revenue: €16.5 million. It is loss-making.
Getting the numbers right
The official valuation is $2 billion (excluding SPAC cash); media widely reported $1.9 billion — just rounding differences. The first-day close implies a fully diluted market cap of roughly $3.8 billion (author's own estimate, not official). Notably, the same day produced three different headline numbers: Reuters reported an intraday surge of 73% cooling to 40% at one moment, Bloomberg showed +52% at another, and the close was +95.2%. Same event, three numbers, depending on when you checked.
A crowded week for quantum capital
Any one of these would be significant; packed into five days, they looked coordinated.
Size comparison among pure-play quantum stocks
Approximate values (billions USD): IonQ ~15.6, D-Wave ~6.5, Rigetti ~5.2, Pasqal ~2.0 (transaction valuation), QUBT ~1.9. Pasqal ranks fourth among pure-play quantum companies at roughly one-eighth of IonQ's size. (Note: the Pasqal figure uses transaction valuation while the others are Aug 28 closing market caps — not perfectly comparable, but indicative of scale.)
Why it's worth watching
The private markets have told the quantum story for two years with privately negotiated valuations; going public means answering to quarterly earnings reports. On 2025 revenue: 2,000 ÷ 16.5 ≈ 121, so a price-to-sales ratio around 120x. Expensive? IonQ is worse. But IonQ has been market-tested for four years — Pasqal is the first neutral-atom company to face that test, moving pricing power for this technology route from VC term sheets to retail investors' order books. CEO Bokhari said "today is not the finish line, it's an acceleration point" — the kind of thing everyone says on listing day. A dual listing on Euronext Paris is planned for 2026 or 2027.
The cold water
Quantum computing remains far from "useful commercial deployment" — all players, Pasqal included, are still struggling through the NISQ era. The specifics of redemption, lock-up, and dilution terms in the SPAC structure weren't fully reviewed here, and those details will determine whether two dollars becomes three or one.
Whether quantum is right or wrong, the market will vote with a quote every quarter. Lies can survive five years in private markets; they won't last one earnings season in public markets.