Quantum’s SPAC Gold Rush: The 2021 Class Promised $1.2 Billion and Delivered $138 Million

Introduction

On April 1, 2024, Zapata Computing began trading on the Nasdaq after completing its merger with Andretti Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company backed by the Andretti racing family. The Harvard spinout had been one of the earliest names in quantum software before rebranding around generative AI. On October 7, 2024, its board approved a plan to cease operations. Nearly every employee was gone within two days, founder and CEO Christopher Savoie resigned, and the proximate trigger was a single investor demanding early repayment of about $2.5 million. Six months and change.

Eighteen months later, quantum companies are queuing for the same vehicle. Since February 2026, Infleqtion, Xanadu, Horizon Quantum Computing, and IQM have all completed SPAC mergers. Pasqal, EigenQ, and Terra Quantum have deals signed and pending. Calcalist reported on July 12 that Quantum Art and Classiq are in advanced negotiations for SPAC listings at target valuations of $2 billion to $5 billion each, and that roughly 30 SPACs are currently hunting for quantum targets. The quantum SPAC is no longer a curiosity. It is the sector’s default exit.

My bottom line up front: the SPAC has historically been the most expensive and least scrutinized route to a public listing (the SEC’s 2024 reforms narrowed the scrutiny gap, but the underlying incentives remain), the first quantum SPAC class delivered roughly 12 cents of every 2025 revenue dollar it projected to investors, and the 2026 wave is running a similar playbook at higher valuations. Before you read anyone’s qubit roadmap, read the sponsor economics and the redemption tables.

That conclusion needs evidence, because I hold quantum companies to the same standard I hold quantum skeptics: data, not adjectives. So this article walks through what a SPAC actually is, what the 2021 quantum SPAC class promised in its own SEC-filed investor decks versus what those companies have since reported in their own SEC-filed earnings, what the academic finance literature found, who is in the 2026 queue and on what terms, and what I would check before treating any of these listings as an investable claim about quantum progress. This article discusses publicly traded securities; it is analysis and opinion rather than investment advice, and full disclosures appear at the end.

What a SPAC Actually Sells

A special purpose acquisition company is a shell. A sponsor forms it, takes it public at a standard $10.00 per share, and parks the proceeds in a trust. The shell has no product, no revenue, and typically 18 to 24 months to find a private company to merge with. If it fails, the trust returns to shareholders. If it succeeds, the private company absorbs the shell’s stock exchange listing in a transaction the industry calls a de-SPAC, usually accompanied by a PIPE, a private investment in public equity from institutions who commit capital at the deal price. The official term for these vehicles is “blank check company,” and for once the official term is the honest one.

Three features of the vehicle decide who wins and who pays. First, the sponsor’s promote: for a nominal investment in founder shares (the sponsor also purchases private placement warrants and funds working expenses, but the total outlay is a fraction of the trust), the sponsor receives roughly 20 percent of the SPAC’s shares. Second, the warrants: SPAC IPO investors typically receive fractional warrants alongside their shares, an overhang of future dilution that follows the merged company for years. Third, the redemption right: any SPAC shareholder can hand back shares for roughly $10.00 in trust cash before the merger closes, while keeping the warrants. Hedge funds do this systematically, which means the cash a target expects from the trust and the cash that actually arrives can differ enormously.

Michael Klausner of Stanford, Michael Ohlrogge of NYU, and Emily Ruan quantified all of this in A Sober Look at SPACs, published in the Yale Journal on Regulation in 2022. For SPACs that merged between January 2019 and June 2020, they found the median SPAC held just $5.70 in net cash per $10.00 share by the time of its merger; the mean was $4.10. The promote, the warrants, the banking fees, and the redemptions consumed the rest. Their follow-up analysis showed that net cash per share predicted post-merger returns, and that the costs fell on the shareholders who stayed while sponsors profited almost regardless of outcome. A sponsor facing a deadline has every incentive to close some deal rather than no deal, because liquidation vaporizes the promote. I should note the finding is contested at the margins: Hal Scott and John Gulliver have argued that the dilution accounting overstates the harm to SPAC investors. The dispute concerns who bears the cost, though, and no one in that debate claims the cost is small.

Why would a serious company choose this structure? Historically, three reasons: speed (months instead of a year or more), a negotiated valuation agreed in private rather than discovered in a bookbuild, and the ability to market multi-year financial projections to public investors, something traditional IPO practice effectively discourages because underwriters bear liability for the prospectus. D-Wave’s CEO Alan Baratz said this plainly in a July 2022 interview filed with the SEC: companies going through the IPO process do not give out forward projections, companies going through the SPAC process provide five-year projections, and D-Wave provided its own. The projections were not a side effect of the structure. For a pre-revenue industry, they were the product.

Keep that in mind, because those five-year projections are now old enough to be graded.

The First Quantum SPAC Cohort

Five quantum and quantum-security companies reached US public markets through SPACs in the first wave, listing between September 2021 and April 2024. IonQ merged with dMY Technology Group III, a vehicle led by Niccolo de Masi and Harry You, and began trading on the NYSE in October 2021. Arqit, a UK quantum-encryption company, merged with Centricus Acquisition Corp. and listed on Nasdaq in September 2021 at a valuation around $1 billion. Rigetti Computing merged with Supernova Partners Acquisition Company II, co-chaired by Spencer Rascoff and Alexander Klabin, and listed in March 2022. D-Wave merged with DPCM Capital, the SPAC of former Uber executive Emil Michael, announced in February 2022 with up to $340 million in gross proceeds and a pro forma market capitalization of up to $1.6 billion, closing that August. Zapata arrived late, closing its Andretti merger in the spring of 2024, just in time to demonstrate the failure mode in compressed form.

The market reception followed a single template. An early spike, then a long slide. Arqit shares peaked at $41.52 shortly after listing before losing more than 90 percent of their value. D-Wave’s share price dropped 84 percent within six months of its debut. Rigetti spent much of 2023 trading below one dollar and received a Nasdaq delisting warning; founder Chad Rigetti had already left the company by the end of 2022, months after acknowledging on an earnings call that redemptions had left Rigetti with less working capital than planned and that the product roadmap would slip. IonQ, the strongest of the group, still traded below $4 at its 2022 low, a decline of more than 70 percent from its SPAC-era highs. PitchBook’s retrospective on the era is blunt: every company in the 2020 to 2022 quantum SPAC class suffered steep drops before any recovery.

The recoveries, where they happened, arrived in late 2024 and 2025, and they had little to do with the companies’ original SPAC-era business plans. Google’s Willow announcement, DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, federal funding pledges, and executive orders ignited a sector-wide rally that lifted every ticker with quantum in the name. The survivors then sold large amounts of new stock into that enthusiasm. That sequence matters for how you interpret the current wave, so I will return to it. First, the scoreboard.

Promised and Delivered

Every number in this section comes from the companies’ own filings: the investor presentations filed with the SEC at deal time, and the earnings releases filed since. This is the part of the story the 2026 wave’s promoters skip.

Start with IonQ, because IonQ is the industry’s showcase and deserves the most careful reading. The March 2021 investor presentation filed by dMY projected the following revenue: $5 million in 2021, $15 million in 2022, $34 million in 2023, $60 million in 2024, $237 million in 2025, and $522 million in 2026, with EBITDA turning positive at $61 million in 2025 and reaching $272 million in 2026, supported by 17 systems online at the end of 2025 and 33 by the end of 2026. IonQ’s actual reported revenue: $2.1 million in 2021, $11.1 million in 2022, $22.0 million in 2023, $43.1 million in 2024, and $130.0 million in 2025, with a 2025 adjusted EBITDA loss of $186.8 million. Current 2026 guidance is $260 to $270 million in revenue with an adjusted EBITDA loss of $310 to $330 million.

Read that fairly and it says two things at once. On revenue, IonQ is the best performer of the class by a wide margin: about 55 percent of its 2025 deck number, and a 2026 guide at roughly half the deck figure, which works out to roughly a one-year lag on the revenue trajectory, though profitability is nowhere near the deck’s timeline. In this cohort, that counts as a triumph. On profitability, the deck promised positive EBITDA in 2025 and $272 million of it in 2026; the company is instead guiding to a loss of more than $300 million in 2026, a swing of over $600 million against plan, by choice, because it is investing in growth. Two further caveats belong in any honest accounting. IonQ supplemented organic growth with acquisitions: the company completed acquisitions of Oxford Ionics for approximately $1.08 billion at announcement, Capella Space, and Lightsynq during 2025, and a February 2026 short-seller report alleged the company was using acquisitions to mask lost government revenue, a claim IonQ disputed. And the SPAC plumbing still distorts the accounts five years on: IonQ’s $805 million of GAAP net income in Q1 2026 was driven almost entirely by a $1.06 billion non-cash gain on the fair value of warrant liabilities, the legacy of the dMY structure. IonQ says it expects organic revenue growth above 100 percent in 2026, and its $470 million in remaining performance obligations is genuine commercial evidence. The company reported roughly 80 percent organic growth in 2025, so the acquisition critique requires qualification: IonQ is growing fast on both legs, and the acquisitions expanded its platform into networking and sensing, which is a strategic bet rather than a cover story. The point about the gap between deck and delivery stands on the revenue and profitability numbers regardless. The point stands regardless: even the class valedictorian is two years behind its own deck on revenue and a third of a billion dollars per year away from the profitability it sold.

Rigetti is a harder read, and I mean that in the arithmetic sense. The October 2021 deck, still hosted on Rigetti’s own site under a slide titled “Positioned for explosive revenue growth,” forecast revenue of $18 million in 2022, $34 million in 2023, $73 million in 2024, $288 million in 2025, and $594 million in 2026, with EBITDA turning positive in 2025. The transaction was priced off that final year: the deck derives its $1.15 billion enterprise value as 1.9 times projected 2026 revenue. The same deck committed to a 1,000-plus qubit system in 2024 and a 4,000-plus qubit system in 2026. What Rigetti reported for 2025: revenue of $7.1 million, down 34 percent year over year, with a GAAP net loss of $216.2 million. That is 2.5 percent of the deck’s 2025 figure; non-GAAP net loss was $50.5 million. Wall Street consensus for Rigetti’s 2026 revenue sits near $24 million, or 4 percent of the $594 million the transaction was priced against. On hardware, the 108-qubit Cepheus system reached general availability in the first quarter of 2026, two years after the deck’s date for 1,000-plus qubits, a milestone that has been pushed back repeatedly from the original 2024 target. CEO Subodh Kulkarni, to his credit, told investors in March that precision and credibility matter more than bold claims and placed practical quantum advantage roughly three years out. The candor is welcome. It is also a quiet repudiation of the document that took the company public.

D-Wave structured its pitch around profitability timing rather than a single headline number, so grade it on its own terms. In the DPCM investor presentation, CFO commentary projected EBITDA turning positive on a sustained basis in the second quarter of 2025 and cash flow turning positive in the first quarter of 2025, describing the transaction as delivering a fully funded business plan. Baratz, in that SEC-filed interview, confirmed the five-year projection started at $11 million for 2022; the interviewer, Rajiv Shukla, characterized the endpoint as rising to about half a billion dollars, a figure Baratz did not correct on the call. (The filed investor deck’s 2026 figure may be lower; see Editor Notes.) D-Wave’s actual 2025: revenue of $24.6 million, up 179 percent on the year thanks largely to a single first-quarter system sale, with a fourth-quarter net loss of $42 million and EBITDA still deeply negative a year past the promised crossover. The company heads into the final year of that five-year projection at roughly 5 percent of the projected endpoint. What D-Wave does have is $884.5 million in cash, a 397 percent increase in a year, raised almost entirely by selling stock into the 2024 to 2025 quantum rally. The original SPAC bought the listing; the rally bought the balance sheet.

Arqit is the cautionary extreme, and I will report it carefully because litigation surrounded it. At its September 2021 listing, Arqit projected $660 million in revenue for 2025. In April 2022, The Wall Street Journal published an investigation, “British Encryption Startup Arqit Overstates Its Prospects, Former Staff and Others Say,” reporting that former employees and people familiar with the company believed its committed revenue consisted largely of government grants and small research contracts and that its encryption platform was earlier-stage than investors understood; Fortune’s account of the report noted Arqit maintained its software was in live production use with enterprise customers at listing. The stock fell more than 20 percent the day the article ran. Shareholder class actions followed, and in June 2026 a federal court approved a $7 million settlement resolving the US cases. In the intervening years the company dropped its satellite plans, executed a reverse stock split, replaced its founding CEO, and refocused on software. Its fiscal-year 2025 revenue (year ending September 30, 2025) was roughly $530,000 against that $660 million projection for 2025, a delivery rate under one tenth of one percent. (H1 fiscal 2026 brought in another $623,000, so the trajectory is not zero, but it is four orders of magnitude below the number that took the company public.) Whatever one concludes about intent, and I draw no conclusion, the gap between the number sold and the number delivered is the widest I have seen in any technology sector I have covered.

Zapata completes the set. It projected, it listed, its stock fell 60 percent on debut, and it ceased operations within seven months of its Nasdaq debut when a counterparty to a forward purchase agreement, one of the exotic financing instruments that de-SPAC companies reach for when redemptions gut the trust, accelerated a $2.5 million payment the company could not make. The company later restructured under new leadership, rebranded as Zapata Quantum, and raised $15 million in April 2026, but it trades on the OTC market with zero 2025 revenue and its former CEO is gone. The SPAC structure’s fragility was the proximate cause of the shutdown; the restructuring’s terms, convertible notes at four cents a share with five-year warrants, tell you what the rescue cost the equity holders who stayed.

Here is the cohort in one table. Three of the five published a specific 2025 revenue projection in their deal materials.

Sum the three published 2025 projections and you get $1.185 billion. Sum what those three companies reported for 2025 and you get about $138 million. Twelve cents on the projected dollar, from the companies’ own filings, before counting one operational shutdown and one blown profitability promise. When I say the burden of proof in this sector sits with the deck writers, this is the base rate I mean.

One more observation for fairness, because I fight quantum denialism as hard as I fight quantum hype. The projection failures above are commercial failures. The physics kept advancing over the same five years: below-threshold error correction was demonstrated, logical qubit counts climbed, and gate fidelities crossed thresholds I track in my CRQC Quantum Capability Framework. IonQ built a business generating real nine-figure revenue. The technology was never the fiction. The revenue curves were.

The Academics Saw It Coming

None of this should have surprised anyone who read the finance literature, which is what makes the 2026 rerun so interesting. Klausner, Ohlrogge, and Ruan circulated their findings in October 2020, a year before the first quantum SPAC closed. Their dilution arithmetic predicted that companies arriving via SPAC would begin public life with a built-in cost handicap, and their 2023 follow-up confirmed that pre-merger net cash per share tracked post-merger returns across the boom. A broader empirical literature, including work by Minmo Gahng, Jay Ritter, and Donghang Zhang in the Review of Financial Studies, documents the same pattern of poor average de-SPAC returns across sample periods and methodologies.

The regulator eventually read the literature too. On January 24, 2024, the SEC adopted final SPAC rules on a 3-2 vote, effective July 1, 2024. The rules stripped away the feature Baratz had described so candidly: the safe harbor for forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act is now unavailable to SPACs and their de-SPAC targets, which puts projections in a SPAC deal on the same liability footing as projections in a traditional IPO, which is to say, a footing lawyers advise against standing on. New Item 1609 of Regulation S-K requires disclosure of the material bases and assumptions behind any projections that are used, targets become co-registrants with direct liability for the disclosure documents, and sponsor compensation, conflicts, and dilution must be laid out explicitly, some of it on the cover page. The full text of Release 33-11265 runs 581 pages.

You can see the new rules in the new decks. Reading the 2026 wave’s deal materials, the five-year revenue hockey stick, the signature exhibit of every 2021 presentation, has largely vanished. Xanadu’s headline projection is a hardware roadmap, 100,000 physical qubits and 500 logical qubits around 2029 to 2030. IQM’s pitch is an installed base and a cash balance. Infleqtion sells sensing contracts and a defense pipeline. The companies now market qubit trajectories instead of revenue trajectories, partly because qubit roadmaps are harder to falsify against audited financials than revenue projections, and a missed qubit date, as Rigetti demonstrated, gets you an awkward earnings call rather than a class action. I consider that a modest improvement with an obvious side effect: the one quantitative claim a CISO or an investor could eventually falsify against audited financials has been replaced by claims that require a physics review to falsify. Conveniently for the issuers, I publish a framework for exactly that review, and I would encourage anyone evaluating these roadmaps to score them against its capability dimensions rather than against the marketing.

The 2026 Quantum SPAC Queue

Now the current wave, on the announced facts. Four pure-play quantum companies have completed SPAC mergers this year as I write, a fifth by some counts, and the pipeline behind them is longer than the completed list.

Infleqtion, the Boulder neutral-atom computing and sensing company, merged with Churchill Capital Corp X, the tenth SPAC of serial sponsor Michael Klein, in a deal announced in September 2025 at a $1.8 billion valuation. It closed on February 17, 2026, raised over $550 million in gross proceeds, and trades on the NYSE as INFQ, the first public neutral-atom company. Its shares have spent most of their public life below the initial merger reference price, declining roughly 30 percent within weeks of listing.

Xanadu, the Toronto photonic company, announced its merger with Crane Harbor Acquisition Corp. on November 3, 2025 in a $3.6 billion deal expecting nearly $500 million in proceeds, $225 million from trust plus a $275 million PIPE. It closed on March 26, 2026 and banked approximately $302 million, redemptions having consumed a large share of the trust. Its first annual report as a public company, filed in April, shows 2025 revenue of $4.6 million, a net loss of $70.7 million, and cash that had fallen to $16.2 million before the merger money arrived, alongside the 100,000-physical-qubit roadmap. The stock ran from its $10 merger price to nearly $40 in a month, then round-tripped back toward $10 by late June, a low-float pattern worth remembering when the next debut quadruples. Founder Christian Weedbrook was direct about the motivation in comments reported by The Wall Street Journal: the decision came down to how much money the company could raise and how fast, because “It is a bit of a race.”

Horizon Quantum Computing, the Singapore quantum-software developer, completed a $503 million merger with dMY Squared and debuted in March under the ticker HQ. The company has negligible revenue; its stock more than doubled anyway, performance PitchBook describes as untethered from its financial picture. Students of the first wave will recognize the sponsor: dMY Squared belongs to the same dMY franchise, led by Niccolo de Masi, that took IonQ public in 2021. De Masi is today IonQ’s chairman and CEO. The man who sponsored the first quantum SPAC now runs the company it created and has sponsored another. I offer that as a plain fact about how small and interlocked this world is, and how concentrated its incentives are. No accusation follows from it.

IQM, the Finnish superconducting-hardware company, announced its merger with Real Asset Acquisition Corp. on February 23, 2026 at a $1.8 billion pre-money valuation and completed it at the start of July, trading on Nasdaq as IQMX with an expected cash position above $450 million. IQM is the first publicly listed European quantum hardware company, a milestone with real quantum sovereignty significance for a continent anxious about depending on American compute. It is also the member of the current class I find easiest to underwrite on fundamentals: 15 systems installed across 13 customer organizations, including European HPC centers, is an actual business with an actual deployment record, whatever one thinks of the price.

Behind the completed deals, the pipeline. Pasqal, the French neutral-atom company, announced a merger with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II in March 2026 at a $2 billion pre-money valuation, expected to close in the second half of the year. EigenQ, a quantum-security and post-quantum cryptography company, signed a $3 billion merger with Silicon Valley Acquisition Corp. on June 17, targeting a Q4 close under the ticker EIGQ, with roughly $215 million sitting in trust before redemptions and partnerships announced with HPE, AMD, and TD SYNNEX. Terra Quantum is reported to be merging with Axiom Intelligence Acquisition Corp 1 after switching horses from an earlier SPAC partner in May. And per Calcalist, Quantum Art, the Weizmann-rooted trapped-ion developer, is well advanced toward a deal, with Classiq, the quantum-software company with roughly $200 million raised and revenue reported in the tens of millions, weighing a SPAC against a pre-IPO round followed by a traditional listing. Both companies declined to comment, and I treat both reports as exactly that, reports. (Also going public via SPAC this year: Quantum Space, which builds spacecraft rather than qubits. Check the ticker twice; the market will not do it for you.)

The scale of this is without precedent for the sector. PitchBook counts $5.7 billion of quantum exit value in Q1 2026 alone, roughly 15 times the sector’s combined exit value from 2023 through 2025, inside a broader SPAC revival that raised $21.6 billion across 118 vehicles in the first half of the year. Wedbush analyst Antoine Legault captured the mood in a line quoted by the Journal: a company with quantum in its name is “worth at least $1 billion from the get go.”

When an analyst can say that out loud, as a description rather than a warning, you are looking at the environment the 2021 class listed into, with the serial numbers filed off.

Quantinuum Took the Hard Road

One company in this cycle chose differently, and its experience is the strongest evidence in this entire article. Quantinuum, the Honeywell-backed trapped-ion company that is, by most measures I track, the technical leader in logical-qubit capability, filed a conventional S-1 in May and priced a traditional IPO on June 3, 2026 at $60 per share, above a twice-raised range, selling 28 million shares to raise $1.68 billion at a market value near $15 billion. The book was reported more than 20 times oversubscribed. The prospectus disclosed everything the SPAC route was designed to soften: 2025 revenue of $30.9 million, a net loss of $192.6 million, a first quarter in which revenue fell 73 percent on lumpy contract timing, and no five-year revenue table anywhere. Investors bought anyway, in size.

CEO Rajeeb Hazra told MarketWatch exactly why the company skipped the SPAC route: it needed to show there is “no air gap between what we’re saying and what we’re doing.” That sentence should be pinned above the desk of every quantum founder currently negotiating with a blank-check sponsor. The most credible company in the field treated the harder, slower, more scrutinized route as a marketing asset, and the market paid it $1.68 billion for the privilege.

The demonstration effect was immediate. SEEQC, the New York cryogenic-control-chip developer, had signed a $1 billion SPAC merger with Allegro Merger Corp. on January 16. On June 29, three weeks after Quantinuum’s debut, SEEQC filed an S-1 for a traditional IPO under the ticker SEQC, opening a dual-track process that allows the company to choose the traditional route if market conditions favor it while maintaining the Allegro agreement as a backstop. Calcalist’s sources say Classiq, the company in the current queue with the most defensible revenue, is weighing a similar fork. The dual-track option tells you something about what Quantinuum’s reception taught the market: companies that can show audited numbers and institutional demand now have a credible alternative to the blank-check route.

Let me be precise about what Quantinuum’s IPO does and does not prove, because I am not here to launder a $15 billion valuation either. At roughly 450 times trailing revenue, QNT’s pricing is not conservative by any historical measure; the traditional route disciplined the process, the disclosure, and the liability. The exuberance came through untouched. What it disproves is the specific argument, made openly by SPAC-route founders, that deep-tech companies cannot pass traditional IPO scrutiny because the usual metrics do not apply to them. Weedbrook made a version of that argument on the record. It was a reasonable claim in 2021. After June 4, 2026, it is a tested and falsified one, at least for any quantum company with real customers.

The Case for Going Public Now

The steelman deserves a fair hearing, because parts of it are correct. Building fault-tolerant quantum computers is brutally capital-intensive; I wrote an entire book about the engineering stack, and the honest cost picture spans cryoplants, fabrication, laser systems, control electronics, and facilities that consume hundreds of millions of dollars per company per year through the decade’s end. Late-stage private capital has crowded into AI, leaving deep tech to fight for scraps; Pasqal’s CEO Wasiq Bokhari frames quantum as running a few years behind AI on the same curve, which is exactly the pitch that opens generalist wallets. Government demand is real: Washington announced roughly $2 billion in preliminary funding agreements across nine quantum companies in May, and DARPA’s benchmarking program has become a de facto credibility filter. Public markets are, right now, paying multiples that no rational private investor will match. Infleqtion’s Matt Kinsella described wanting to secure the capital while the chance existed. On their own terms, these are sane executive decisions. I ran a security firm through the 1999 to 2000 IPO window, and I watched sane executives make identical decisions for identical reasons; the companies that raised big in 1999 and spent carefully were the ones still alive in 2003, so I will not pretend the race logic is irrational.

Notice, though, what the steelman actually supports. Capital intensity, AI crowding, and government tailwinds are arguments for going public. None of them is an argument for going public through a SPAC. The SPAC-specific advantages are three: speed, a privately negotiated valuation, and reduced scrutiny. The fourth advantage, projection marketing, died with the SEC’s July 2024 rules. Speed is worth something in a race. The other two are worth the most to companies whose valuations a competitive bookbuild would mark down, which brings me to the argument I actually want to make.

The Sorting Machine

I have been skeptical of SPACs for years, and my working hypothesis has always been blunt: the structure disproportionately attracts companies that could not come public the normal way. Marin’s rule of thumb is not evidence, though, so before writing this piece I went looking for reasons to abandon it. I did not find them. I found three independent lines of evidence pointing the same direction.

The structural line: a sponsor holding a 20 percent promote against a two-year deadline earns nothing from walking away and millions from closing anything, which means the deal-selection filter is systematically weaker than an underwriter’s, whose franchise depends on the aftermarket. Klausner and his co-authors documented where that leads.

Empirical evidence points the same way: the 2021 quantum class, graded above, delivered 12 cents of projected revenue on the dollar, and the class’s one clean success is still two years behind its own deck.

Most persuasive to me is the behavioral line: watch what companies do when they have a choice. Quantinuum, holding the sector’s strongest revenue and the strongest logical-qubit record, chose the demanding route and was rewarded. PsiQuantum, having raised well over a billion dollars privately, keeps raising privately. QuEra took $230 million from Google, SoftBank, and NVentures rather than a listing. SEEQC signed a SPAC deal and then opened a dual-track process by filing for a traditional IPO alongside it. Classiq, the queue member with real revenue, is reported to be weighing the traditional route. Meanwhile the committed SPAC queue consists, with respect, mostly of companies reporting single-digit-millions revenue, or none, seeking valuations between $1 billion and $3.6 billion. To put it bluntly: a SPAC lets a company be priced by negotiation instead of by discovery, and the companies most eager for that trade are, on average, the ones with the most to lose from discovery.

Two honest qualifications, so this stays analysis rather than prejudice. First, the sorting is statistical; it says nothing decisive about any individual company. IonQ went the SPAC route and built a real business; IQM arrives with an installed base most of the 2021 class never had; a company can choose a SPAC for speed alone and still execute. None of this is a claim about the technology, integrity, or prospects of any specific company in the current queue, and I would apply the same capability scoring to a SPAC-listed machine as to any other. Second, the counterfactual is not free: staying private has costs too, and a company that dies fully diluted but funded beats a company that dies pure. My claim is narrower and, I think, safer: when you see a pre-revenue company choose the one route that historically enabled aggressive projections, minimized scrutiny, and paid sponsors regardless of outcome, at a valuation negotiated rather than tested, the burden of proof shifts to the company. The 2021 scoreboard is why.

What This Means for Quantum Itself

Start with what it does not mean. Ticker symbols are not qubits. Nothing in this listing wave changes the engineering distance to a cryptographically relevant quantum computer; that distance is measured in error-corrected logical qubits, magic-state throughput, and decoder latency, the dimensions of my CRQC Quantum Capability Framework, and it moves on laboratory results. Nasdaq has no vote. My Q-Day analysis did not shift when Rigetti fell to 38 cents, and it does not shift when Xanadu quadruples in a month. If you are a CISO, your migration clock is set by regulators, insurers, and counterparties, and by the harvest-now-decrypt-later exposure of your long-lived data, none of which reads stock charts.

The listing wave still matters to the field, in both directions. On the credit side, public companies file audited numbers. The only reason I could grade the 2021 class this precisely is that de-SPAC companies must report quarterly, and the discipline of 10-Ks, Item 1609 assumption disclosure, and hostile short-sellers is, whatever its discomforts, an information-quality upgrade over the private market’s curated data rooms. Five years from now I will be able to write this article about the class of 2026 with the same precision, and the companies know it.

On the debit side sits the risk I care most about, because it is systemic rather than personal to any investor. The expensive years of the fault-tolerance buildout, roughly 2027 through 2030 on most credible roadmaps, arrive immediately after this listing wave. If the class of 2026 repeats the class of 2021, the drawdowns, the delisting warnings, the quiet wind-downs, public capital will shut precisely when the sector’s capital needs peak. Zapata’s failure was absorbed because Zapata was small. A $3 billion failure would headline every business section for a week, hand the quantum panic industry a fresh fear narrative, hand the denialists a fresh obituary, and make the next honest company’s raise harder across every hardware modality at once, because retail investors do not distinguish photonics from trapped ions on the way out the door. The people holding the losses, as in 2021 and 2022, will mostly be individuals who bought a story at $38 with no lockup, no PIPE discount, and no promote cushioning the fall. The sponsors, as the Stanford data showed last time, will be fine.

That asymmetry, more than any single deal term, is my objection.

How I Read a Quantum SPAC Deck

For readers evaluating any of these listings, current or coming, this is my working checklist. It is short deliberately.

1. Net cash per share after redemptions. Ignore the headline trust figure; find the redemption results in the closing 8-K and compute what actually arrived. Klausner’s research says this single number predicts more than anything in the deck. Xanadu targeted roughly $500 million and received about $302 million; that gap is information.
2. Sponsor economics. Size the promote, the warrant overhang, and the vesting triggers. If sponsor shares vest on share-price milestones rather than operating milestones, you know what the sponsor is incentivized to manage.
3. Projections against the base rate. If the deal materials include financial projections, read the Item 1609 assumptions and then apply the 2021 class’s delivery rate of 12 cents on the dollar as your prior. If the materials include only a qubit roadmap, score it against the CRQC framework’s capability dimensions and demand the error-correction numbers instead of the physical-qubit count.
4. Revenue quality. Separate audited recognized revenue from bookings, bookings from pipeline, and organic growth from acquired growth. The distinction between a signed government contract and a memorandum of understanding is the distinction between a business and a press release.
5. Lockups and float. Small floats made Xanadu a fourfold rocket and then a round trip in ninety days. Know when insider and PIPE lockups expire, because that calendar moves these stocks more than qubit announcements do.
6. Position sizing. These are venture-risk instruments wearing public-market clothing. Every drawdown statistic I have cited happened to companies whose technology kept improving the entire time.

Watch the Redemption Numbers

Between now and year-end, Pasqal, EigenQ, Terra Quantum, and possibly Quantum Art and Classiq will put final terms in front of shareholders. The announcement valuations will get the headlines. The information will be elsewhere: in the redemption percentages, the net cash delivered, the PIPE pricing relative to the $10 fiction, and the speed with which each newly public company returns to the market to sell more stock. Those numbers, not the launch-day pop, told the truth about the class of 2021 within months, for anyone who looked.

The next Zapata will begin with an opening bell. So did Quantinuum. The difference was never audible from the podium; it was written in the prospectus, in revenue a customer had already paid, and in a management team willing to let a hostile market set the price. Watch the redemptions. I will be.

Disclosures and Disclaimers

I am the founder and CEO of Applied Quantum, a quantum systems integration and advisory firm that provides consulting services across the quantum industry, and I invest in private quantum technology startups through Quantum.Partners. I hold no positions, long or short, in any publicly traded company discussed above. Neither Applied Quantum, Quantum.Partners, nor any other entity I am associated with holds such positions or has a commercial relationship with any company in the 2026 SPAC pipeline discussed above.

This article is analysis and opinion. It is not investment, legal, or tax advice. I am not a licensed financial advisor, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Quantum computing is an early-stage sector with extreme volatility and significant technical and commercial risk; do your own research and consult a licensed professional before making investment decisions.

Where this article describes allegations, investigations, short-seller reports, or litigation, it reports them as attributed claims, notes the companies’ responses and denials where they were made, and asserts no wrongdoing by any company or individual. Settlements referenced were resolutions of claims and involved no findings of liability. All financial figures come from the cited SEC filings, company announcements, and press reports as of July 14, 2026, and may have changed. Forward-looking statements quoted from historical deal materials were made subject to the assumptions and safe-harbor language of their time.