Shares in Pasqal rose as much as 73% on their first day of trading on Nasdaq before settling around 40% higher.
The French quantum computing company reached the market through a merger with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp II, a blank-cheque vehicle that raises money from investors and then hunts for a private company to take public.
The deal valued Pasqal at roughly $2 billion and left the loss-making business with about $360 million in cash, earmarked for building more machines.
A different route to the qubit
Pasqal builds quantum computers using neutral atoms, held in place by lasers acting as optical tweezers and then manipulated to perform calculations.
The approach avoids the elaborate refrigeration required by the superconducting chips favoured by IBM and Google, and adding computing power means adding atoms to an array rather than fabricating new circuitry.
Seven machines are already in the field, three more are in production, and plants in France and Canada can turn out up to 13 a year.
Customers include Saudi Aramco and LG Electronics.
Nobel roots and a French anchor
Alain Aspect, who co-founded the company in 2019 and shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for proving quantum entanglement, is non-executive chairman.
Bpifrance, the French state investment bank and a longstanding backer, holds a board seat.
The French government also retains a veto over large stakes acquired by non-EU investors, an unusual condition to carry onto an American exchange.
The numbers behind the enthusiasm
Pasqal generated €16.5 million of revenue in 2025, putting the transaction value at roughly 100 times sales.
That gap reflects a sector priced on what quantum machines might eventually do rather than what they currently earn.
Errors in quantum processors remain frequent enough to limit reliability at scale, and no application has yet emerged to do for the field what large language models did for artificial intelligence.
Google expects distinctively quantum applications within five years, while IBM is targeting a large, error-corrected machine by 2029.
Washington's money, and who gets it
The listing arrives in the middle of a policy push in the United States, following a presidential order on accelerating quantum development.
The Commerce Department signed preliminary agreements in May to hand about $2 billion to nine quantum companies, including $1 billion for IBM, in exchange for minority equity stakes.
Pasqal is not among the recipients, leaving it dependent on French and European support while several of its Nasdaq-listed rivals draw on federal capital.
