Governments committed $12.7 billion in new funding to quantum technology in 2025, according to the Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C), an industry group. Private venture investors added $4.9 billion, nearly three times their 2024 total. The consortium put the size of the quantum market that year at $1.9 billion. The three figures measure different things: commitments that can span several years, money raised in one year, and one year’s sales.
Companies founded on university research raised several of the year’s largest venture rounds. IonQ, founded in 2015 on trapped-ion technology licensed from the University of Maryland and from Duke, projected $237 million of revenue for 2025 in an investor presentation filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission when it agreed to list its shares in 2021. It reported $130.0 million of revenue for 2025 and a loss of $186.8 million in adjusted EBITDA, IonQ’s own measure of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. In 2021, IonQ had forecast EBITDA of $61 million for 2025, under the definition it used then.
Quantum spin-offs spend most of their capital years before they make a profit, so the ones in this review whose financing has worked pair non-dilutive public money with patient investors. The companies that listed in 2026 raised cash and gave their early investors a public market for their shares. None has yet shown a shorter path to profit.
Non-dilutive money, such as a grant or a research contract, costs founders no ownership. Patient capital, as used here, means money from investors who can keep a stake for a decade or more, such as sovereign wealth funds, pension insurers, governments, and corporations.
Grants and government contracts
In the United States, the main grant programs for small technology companies, Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR), had no legal authority for six months before President Trump signed the Small Business Innovation and Economic Security Act on April 13, 2026. The law extends both programs through September 2031, the Congressional Research Service reported.
Congress also created Strategic Breakthrough Awards of up to $30 million for companies that have already received a Phase II award, the programs’ second and larger stage. A company must match each award dollar for dollar with new private capital or other federal money. Agencies must now screen applicants for security risks tied to foreign connections. From fiscal 2027, they must also cap how many proposals one company can submit.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) pays in larger tranches and attaches more conditions. It lists awards of up to $300 million per company in the final stage of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, in which government evaluators test whether a proposed utility-scale computer can be built. Diraq, a Sydney company founded on 20 years of research by its chief executive, Andrew Dzurak, disclosed an initial tranche of $51 million when it entered that stage on October 7, 2026. IonQ, which entered the same day, said that “funding beyond the initial obligation remains subject to future appropriations and DARPA funding actions.”
The Energy Department pays for results in its Q Competition. Of up to $215 million, the department plans to pay $200 million only to companies that reach its “first-generation” goal, which it defines as at least 100 logical qubits, the error-protected units of quantum information that fault-tolerant computers use. It plans to split a $100 million general pool among the companies that reach that goal and two bonus pools of $50 million each among those that reach 150 or more and 200 or more logical qubits. It has $2.5 million of fiscal 2026 money for the competition, with later funding dependent on appropriations by Congress.
Governments also buy machines and testbeds, a source of revenue that costs spin-offs no ownership. The UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre (NQCC) commissioned seven testbeds for £30 million in total, from companies including Oxford Ionics, Quantum Motion, and QuEra’s UK subsidiary. Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology bought a QuEra machine for about $41 million, as Quantum Observer reported in its profile of QuEra.
In Europe, the European Innovation Council (EIC) offers companies in its Accelerator program a grant of up to €2.5 million for development work. The EIC Fund can add an investment of €1 million to €10 million, as equity or as quasi-equity such as a convertible loan.
Grants and contracts cost no ownership, but funders such as DARPA and the Energy Department tie the money to milestones they choose and pay it in stages. Programs can stop when their legal authority lapses, as SBIR and STTR did for six months. Money a legislature has not yet appropriated may not arrive.
University stakes and early backers
A university usually licenses its patents to a spin-off in exchange for shares.
In a government-commissioned UK review in November 2023, Irene Tracey and Andrew Williamson recommended TenU’s University Spin-out Investment Terms (USIT) Guide as a starting point for life-sciences spin-offs, in which universities would hold 10% to 25%. For sectors less dependent on intellectual property, common among software-only spin-offs, they called for university equity of 10% or less. They placed hardware and engineering spin-offs, the category that includes quantum hardware companies, between software and life sciences. They asked universities, investors, and founders to develop guidance jointly for software spin-offs and for hardware and engineering spin-offs.
Chris Ballance and Tom Harty started Oxford Ionics in 2019, after meeting as Oxford doctoral students. The company went from a university laboratory to a sale. Oxford Science Enterprises gave the company early backing, according to Oxford University Innovation, before IonQ completed its $1.075 billion purchase in September 2025.
A university stake costs founders ownership from the first day, before any outside investor arrives. In return, the spin-off receives a license to the patents it was founded on.
Venture capital
PsiQuantum, founded in 2016 on theoretical work from Imperial College London and the University of Bristol, raised $1 billion in September 2025 at a $7 billion valuation. Funds managed by BlackRock affiliates led the round with Temasek and Baillie Gifford. The Qatar Investment Authority, the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar, joined as a new investor.
IQM, a spin-off of Aalto University and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, raised $320 million the same month. The Finnish pension insurers Elo and Varma joined a round led by Ten Eleven Ventures, which IQM described as a cybersecurity-focused investment firm. QuEra, founded by Harvard and MIT scientists, raised more than $230 million in February 2025, with SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Valor Equity Partners among its new investors.
In each venture round, founders give up part of the company to pay for more years of development. Investors who bought PsiQuantum shares at a $7 billion valuation profit only if a later buyer or the stock market values the company higher. Neither the pension insurers in IQM’s round nor the sovereign wealth fund in PsiQuantum’s has a venture fund’s fixed term.
Strategic investors and acquirers
NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture arm, joined PsiQuantum’s 2025 round and expanded QuEra’s Series B. NVIDIA thus has stakes in rival platforms, photonic in PsiQuantum’s case and neutral-atom in QuEra’s. IQM listed the Schwarz Group and Winbond Electronics as strategic investors in its round.
Corporations also buy quantum companies outright. Oxford Ionics’ founders and early investors sold the company to IonQ six years after it started. IonQ had agreed to pay $1.065 billion in its own shares and about $10 million in cash. Intel agreed in October 2026 to buy Classiq, a quantum software company, and expects the deal to close in the first half of 2027.
A strategic investor can become a customer, a supplier, or the eventual buyer. A buyer also ends the spin-off’s independence and pays its founders on the terms of the deal.
Public listings and SPACs
A special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, is a listed shell that holds investors’ cash in a trust until it merges with a private company that then takes over its stock-exchange listing. SPAC shareholders may redeem their shares for cash before the merger, so a company can receive less than the trust held.
Four quantum hardware companies listed through SPAC mergers in 2026. Infleqtion completed its merger with Churchill Capital Corp X on February 17 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It reported more than $550 million in gross proceeds, including nearly all the cash in the SPAC’s trust and a private placement of more than $125 million.
Xanadu, a photonic quantum computing company based in Toronto, completed its merger with Crane Harbor Acquisition Corp. in March, with a $275 million private placement. It listed its shares on Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange on March 27.
IQM completed its merger with Real Asset Acquisition Corp. on July 1 and reported net proceeds of about $233.5 million, including a $145.5 million private placement. Pasqal, co-founded by the Nobel laureate Alain Aspect, completed its merger with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II on August 27, with about $360 million of cash available at closing.
Quantinuum chose a conventional initial public offering instead, selling 28 million shares at $60 each on Nasdaq in June for $1.68 billion before underwriting discounts, according to its prospectus.
The Securities and Exchange Commission tightened its rules for SPAC mergers in January 2024. It made a legal safe harbor for forward-looking statements unavailable to SPACs and required disclosure of the assumptions behind any projections. It also required more disclosure of sponsor compensation, conflicts of interest, and dilution.
A listed spin-off publishes audited accounts and regular financial reports in exchange for cash and for shares that its early investors can eventually sell. IonQ’s 2025 revenue, four years after its merger, was about 55% of the figure in its 2021 projections.
In November 2026, IonQ raised its 2026 revenue guidance to $505 million to $515 million, close to the $522 million it had projected for the year in 2021. It reported $83.5 million of its $173.8 million in third-quarter revenue, nearly half, from its SkyWater Foundry Services segment, after completing its acquisition of SkyWater, a U.S. semiconductor foundry, during the quarter. IonQ attributed its third-quarter net income of $564.0 million to “the non-cash mark-to-market impact of warrants.”
Government equity
Governments have started buying shares as a condition of their funding. In May 2026, the Commerce Department signed letters of intent with nine companies for CHIPS Act incentives that it put at $2.013 billion in total. Commerce said it would receive “a minority, non-controlling equity stake in each company.”
In September, Commerce finalized awards of up to $100 million each with D-Wave, Rigetti, Quantinuum, and PsiQuantum, and an award of up to $375 million with GlobalFoundries. For D-Wave, Rigetti, and Quantinuum, it made part of each award available at the start and tied the remainder to project milestones. On September 16, it finalized an award of up to $1 billion with Anderon, a newly formed IBM subsidiary.
D-Wave issued its shares to Commerce at a price 15% below a reference closing price, according to Quantum Observer’s report on the agreements. D-Wave disclosed that Commerce generally cannot vote those shares. Quantinuum agreed that inventions from its project must be “predominantly produced or licensed for production in the United States” during the project and for 10 years after it. Diraq holds a letter of intent for up to $38 million from Commerce alongside its DARPA tranche.
Australia’s Commonwealth and Queensland governments committed A$940 million, about $620 million, to PsiQuantum in April 2024, in a package of equity, grants, and loans. PsiQuantum said at the time that it planned to have its site near Brisbane Airport operational by the end of 2027.
In May 2026, PsiQuantum moved the project from Brisbane Airport to Moreton Bay Central, and it broke ground there on June 18. It gave no new completion date in either announcement. Forbes Australia reported in May that the project had run months behind schedule.
In October 2026, the U.S. Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital made a conditional commitment to lend PsiQuantum up to $150 million. PsiQuantum said the proposed financing “remains strictly conditional and is not guaranteed.”
In Europe, IQM’s 2025 round included Tesi, which IQM described as “a state-owned, market-driven investment company,” and two public investors that it called sovereign wealth funds, the EIC and Bayern Kapital. The EIC Fund is the European Union’s venture-capital arm, and Bayern Kapital is the venture-capital company of the state of Bavaria.
Government investors have no fund deadline, but their equity still costs founders ownership, sometimes at a discount to the market price. A government investor can also limit where a company builds, as Commerce did in its agreement with Quantinuum.
The case for listing
Matthew Kinsella, Infleqtion’s chief executive, said in the company’s announcement that as a public company, Infleqtion could accelerate its technology roadmap and expand deployments. Listed companies can pay for engineers, fabrication, and acquisitions sooner. Inder Singh, then IonQ’s chief financial officer, cited nearly 80% year-over-year organic growth for 2025. IonQ held $1.7 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and investments on September 30, 2026, before closing a $2.0 billion equity offering on October 16.
IonQ reported an adjusted EBITDA loss of $350.6 million for the first nine months of 2026, more than its loss for all of 2025. In 2021, it had projected EBITDA of $272 million for 2026, by its definition at the time. IonQ is now close to the revenue it projected in 2021, partly through an acquisition, but not to the profit.
DARPA defines utility-scale operation as the point at which a machine’s computational value exceeds its cost, and it designed its benchmarking initiative to test whether any approach can reach that point by 2033. The Energy Department aims for a first fault-tolerant machine by 2028. DARPA and the Energy Department apply those dates to listed and private companies alike.
What would confirm or overturn the position
The position can be tested against three sets of numbers. The first is the revenue and operating losses that IonQ, Infleqtion, Xanadu, IQM, and Pasqal report for 2027 and 2028, now that each files public accounts.
The second is the Energy Department’s choice of companies for its Q Competition, expected no earlier than November 13, 2026, and its evaluation in September 2028, when most of the competition’s money is due to be paid for results. The third is whether Commerce turns the three remaining letters of intent, with Atom Computing, Infleqtion, and Diraq, into final awards with equity.
If a quantum spin-off reached profitability on private money alone, with no grants, government contracts, or public-sector shareholders, the pairing argument would be overturned. None of the companies discussed here had done so as of November 2026.
