Europe’s two largest quantum computing firms have announced plans to list on United States stock markets at almost exactly the moment the European Commission was finalising an urgent programme to stop deep tech companies turning to foreign investors for the late-stage capital they cannot raise at home. Finland’s IQM and France’s Pasqal, both describing a need to raise funds in order to grow and innovate more quickly, have each arranged mergers with Special Purpose Acquisition Vehicles, shell companies funded and listed on the Nasdaq by United States investors for the specific purpose of merging with deep tech firms that need growth capital and a public market listing quickly. The timing has drawn a sharp response from European investors and executives, who see the development as a structural indictment of the continent’s inability to back its own technology champions through to commercial viability.
Quantum computing firms need hundreds of millions of euros from investors to develop technology that is still so advanced that most expect it will be 2030, with hundreds of millions more spent, before they deliver systems capable of meeting expectations. This dynamic is characteristic of deep tech more broadly, a category that also includes artificial intelligence, biotech, robotics, and space, where the upfront cost of research and development is high, the time to a commercial product is often measured in decades, and the risk of failure is sufficiently large that European investors have historically been willing to fund early stages of growth but not the capital-intensive scaling phase. Two-thirds of the world’s global scaleups are in the United States, and not a tenth in Europe, according to the European Commission’s own findings, with United States investors accounting for half the world’s venture capital, China almost as much, and Europe just five percent.
Neither Pasqal nor IQM has framed the move as a direct consequence of Europe’s funding gaps. Pasqal Chief Executive Wasiq Bokhari said the company has a strategy to invest abroad because the quantum computing market is international, and that it saw in the United States an opportunity to raise money on the world’s largest public capital market and to sell computers in the world’s largest market for quantum computing, so that it could become a truly global company, while retaining its French roots, with its core hardware research and development and 80 percent of staff remaining in France. IQM Chief Executive Jan Goetz said the company sought a dual listing so it could remain eligible for funding from institutional European investors whose rules forbid them from investing in United States stocks, adding that a public listing would also give IQM visibility and that public scrutiny would increase trust among potential customers. Both firms also told investors that they sought United States listings partly to gain financial leverage to acquire other quantum computing firms in preparation for expected industry consolidation, following a model already established by United States firm IonQ, which used its public listing to fund eight acquisitions including a 1.1 billion dollar takeover of the United Kingdom’s Oxford Ionics.
The response from European investors and observers has been pointed. Ion Hauer, principal at deep tech venture capital firm Apex Partners, said that Europe was once again taking on early-stage risk and funding basic research and development, only to watch the commercial value and liquidity be harvested by United States public markets, and that the fact that Europe’s two premier, unicorn-status quantum hardware champions had to use United States blank-cheque companies to get the money they need to scale is an indictment of late-stage private capital in Europe. Meanwhile, the European Commission entered negotiations with financiers over the management of a three billion euro ScaleUp Europe fund raised in a hurry to stop deep tech firms turning to foreign backers, with EU innovation commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva saying the scheme aimed to ensure that the success of European technology champions becomes Europe’s success. The fund aims to make its first investments in summer 2026, at approximately the same time as IQM and Pasqal’s flotations, a coincidence that investors and executives described with a mix of frustration and equanimity as emblematic of Europe’s tendency to act just after the moment of maximum impact has already passed.
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