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  • 🔵 The Quantum Insider Weekly | Quantinuum Eyeing IPO. Funding Round Spike Continues. And More News in Quantum!

🔵 The Quantum Insider Weekly | Quantinuum Eyeing IPO. Funding Round Spike Continues. And More News in Quantum!

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FROM THE EDITOR.

Sometimes the biggest news is not the most surprising news.

The reality of a Quantinuum IPO — long speculated about — became more solid this week. Honeywell, which is the majority owner of Quantinuum, announced it plans to confidentially submit a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

While it doesn’t guarantee an IPO — a company still has the ability to maneuver around events, such as poor market conditions, at this point — but it is perhaps the first concrete step that the public offering will happen.

Stepping back from news on this potential IPO specifically, we’re beginning to see a more mature landscape for investors seeking to add quantum to their portfolios. Again, things can change, but we could likely see each quantum modality represented in the public markets — including two trapped-ion giants.

SEEQC also announced this week that it is aiming at inclusion on the public markets, though via a SPAC arrangement.

These developments — along with several funding rounds (that you can read about below) — bear watching as quantum’s emergence appears to be sliding into a new gear.

Have a great weekend and thanks for reading!

— Matt, Chief Content Officer at The Quantum Insider

INSIDER BRIEF.

The Noteworthy & Nuanced

Wordplay, wordplay everywhere! QUDORA Technologies has introduced Qamelion, a quantum computing emulator for testing algorithms under realistic, hardware-like noise conditions. Some features include adjustable noise models, hybrid classical quantum execution, and compatibility with OpenQASM, Qiskit, and QIR, enabling thorough evaluation of near-term and future algorithms. Available through QUDORA’s cloud with a free trial, Qamelion will also be offered in Japan through Fixstars Amplify.

“Pan-European Quantum Corridor” - sounds fancy, doesn’t it? SEALSQ has expanded its Quantum Investment Fund from $35M to more than $100M. All in order to create the aforementioned corridor and advance Europe’s post-quantum security and sovereign quantum computing ambitions. The company is deploying capital across PQC hardware, secure satellites, blockchain identity systems, QKD, and quantum-ready semiconductors in multiple countries.

Illinois is pumping out support for quantum startups. The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park (IQMP) and Silicon Catalyst have formed a partnership that will give companies in Silicon Catalyst’s accelerator access to lab space, specialized equipment, cryogenic infrastructure, and the National Quantum Facility. This is all facilitated by the Illinois EDC, as part of a strategy to attract and retain quantum firms in the state. — Alan Kanapin, Analyst at The Quantum Insider

The Research Rundown

Check out this week’s handpicked quantum research. These are studies headed for real-world impact: improving accuracy, reducing latency, using fewer resources, or solving problems that classical methods struggle with. These are early developments, but they hint at where quantum might earn its keep.

Want more research insights? Get them delivered straight to your inbox Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with The Daily Qubit. Subscribe below or use the link to update preferences at the end of this email. 👇️

In this episode of The Quantum Economy Podcast, Anders Indset and Andrew Cheung make the case that quantum risk is already active through “harvest now, decrypt later” threats, making post-quantum security an immediate concern. Cheung emphasizes that the real challenge is execution since migrating to quantum-safe systems requires coordinated, system-wide change across legacy infrastructure. Together, they frame quantum-safe migration as a leadership and governance issue, clarifying why post-quantum cryptography is essential for open global systems while quantum key distribution serves narrower, closed-network use cases.

➡️ Honeywell disclosed that its majority-owned quantum subsidiary, Quantinuum, plans to confidentially submit a draft Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, marking a formal step toward a potential initial public offering.
➡️ The confidential filing initiates the SEC review process but does not commit Quantinuum to an offering, with Honeywell emphasizing that timing, valuation, and share pricing remain undetermined.
➡️ Sources familiar with the process indicate the transaction could value Quantinuum at more than $20 billion and raise roughly $1 billion, though those figures have not been confirmed publicly.
➡️ The move follows a series of public-market entries and announced transactions across the quantum sector, including planned listings involving Xanadu Quantum Technologies, Infleqtion, and Horizon Quantum Computing.
➡️ If completed, these transactions would place multiple leading quantum modalities — superconducting, neutral atom, and trapped ion — within reach of public market investors for the first time.

Analyst Commentary

Honeywell’s disclosure around Quantinuum’s confidential S-1 submission may represent the first concrete step from long-standing speculation toward market reality. For years, the quantum community has debated whether and when a company with Quantinuum’s scale and technical breadth would test public markets. This announcement does not answer that question definitively, but it does move the discussion from hypothetical to formal.

Confidential filings have become a common mechanism for technology companies seeking flexibility amid uneven capital markets. In Quantinuum’s case, the approach allows engagement with regulators without immediately exposing detailed financials or committing to a timetable. That matters in quantum especially because commercial traction is still emerging and where public investors have shown uneven tolerance for long-horizon technologies.

Quantinuum occupies a distinct position among quantum companies. Formed through the merger of Honeywell Quantum Solutions and Cambridge Quantum, it operates across hardware, software and cryptography, with a workforce likely exceeding 630 employees spread across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan. Its superconducting systems, quantum software platforms and post-quantum cryptography tools have made it one of the most vertically integrated players in the field.

From Honeywell’s perspective, an eventual IPO would accomplish a few key goals for the company. It would provide Quantinuum with direct access to capital markets while creating a pathway toward operational independence and standalone governance. The disclosure signals optionality rather than urgency, which is a theme we pick up through the statement’s careful language.

The broader context is just as important as this single — if not critical — step. Over the past year, the quantum sector has begun to test public-market pathways through a mix of special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) and merger structures. Xanadu has announced a definitive agreement with Crane Harbor Acquisition Corp. Infleqtion has outlined plans to go public via a merger led by veteran dealmaker Michael Klein, with a reported pre-investment valuation of $1.8 billion. Horizon Quantum Computing has signed a non-binding letter of intent with dMY Squared Technology Group. Taken together, these moves suggest an industry no longer content to remain exclusively private.

If these transactions proceed, public investors would gain exposure to most major quantum architectures, including superconducting, neutral atom and trapped-ion approaches. That development challenges the long-held assumption that quantum computing would remain a predominantly venture-backed, pre-revenue domain for the foreseeable future.

At the same time, caution remains warranted. None of these offerings guarantee sustained public-market performance, and the gap between technical leadership and predictable revenue remains wide. Market conditions, regulatory review and investor appetite will ultimately determine which of these plans reach completion.

So, to level-set: Quantinuum’s confidential filing stands out as a signal event. It does not declare the arrival of quantum computing as a public-market success story. Howeverm, it does indicate that the sector’s most established players are beginning to test whether long-term quantum strategies can coexist with public-market expectations. In that sense, the filing is less about timing the market and more about expanding the set of available options.

DATA SPOTLIGHT.

PacketLight Networks and NEC demonstrated quantum key distribution over a 400G dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) network using a dual-fiber setup. They integrated NEC’s QKD system with PacketLight’s PL-4000M 600G Muxponder, achieving 100% data throughput and low latency, verified via a 100GbE tester. The QKD ran over a dedicated parallel fiber, maintaining quantum signal integrity. The result: a cost-effective, scalable quantum-safe model with zero performance tradeoffs on existing high-capacity infrastructure.

INDUSTRY HIGHLIGHTS.

🔑 Quantum-safe security is shifting from long-term theory to near-term infrastructure deployment as governments set migration timelines and enterprises respond to “harvest now, decrypt later” risks, favoring companies that can execute quickly against evolving standards. A brief positions 01 Quantum as an example of this execution-first cohort, emphasizing deployable, standards-aligned solutions, integration with existing security stacks, and verifiable commercial traction over speculative scale narratives.

🤝 Xanadu Quantum Technologies has partnered with Thorlabs to develop customized optical fiber components that improve phase and polarization stability, a key bottleneck in scaling photonic quantum computing systems.

📸 Diffraqtion, an MIT and University of Maryland spinout, raised $4.2 million in pre-seed funding to commercialize a quantum camera that enables lower-cost satellite constellations with higher-resolution, faster imaging for space domain awareness and Earth observation.

🖥️ Haiqu raised an $11 million seed round to advance a hardware-aware quantum operating system that reduces the cost of running near-term quantum applications by optimizing circuits, shielding errors, and orchestrating workloads across imperfect hardware.

🔐 The Year of Quantum Security 2026 formally launched in Washington, framing quantum security as an immediate infrastructure and governance challenge that demands long-term planning to protect data, cryptographic systems, and quantum technologies themselves.

💻️ IBM has opened early cloud access to its 120-qubit Nighthawk quantum processor and an upgraded Heron system, giving users a first look at hardware designed to support deeper, more connected quantum circuits while keeping error rates low. IBM’s roadmap projects successive Nighthawk iterations through 2028, with connectivity and circuit depth increasing from roughly 5,000 two-qubit gates today toward 15,000 in future systems.

🥼 Rigetti Computing has delayed general availability of its 108-qubit Cepheus-1-108Q system to around the end of Q1 2026 to allow additional testing and a new chip iteration aimed at improving tunable coupler performance and two-qubit gate fidelity. Rigetti Computing reports current median two-qubit fidelities of 99% on the 108-qubit system, with a target of 99.5% as optimization continues.

🪙 BTQ Technologies has launched the Bitcoin Quantum testnet, the first quantum-safe fork of Bitcoin, replacing ECDSA with NIST-standardized ML-DSA to provide a production-grade environment for testing post-quantum transactions without risking the mainnet.

🏫 Zapata Quantum has partnered with the University of Maryland to develop a verification-first approach to quantum application development, applying formal, proof-based methods to ensure correctness from algorithm design through quantum circuit implementation.

🧊 Yaqumo Inc. and Entropica Labs have signed an MOU to collaborate on hardware–software co-design for cold-atom quantum computing, focusing on hardware-aware transpilation, circuit optimization, and fault-tolerant error correction.

🇹🇼 SEEQC has launched a U.S.–Taiwan quantum technology ecosystem that links semiconductor manufacturing, electronics, and academic research to accelerate commercialization of its SFQ-based, chip-integrated quantum computing platform. The initiative keeps SEEQC’s core quantum architecture and IP in the United States while leveraging Taiwan’s manufacturing and electronics expertise.

💸 QBird has secured €2.5 million in EIC Accelerator grant funding and €5 million in equity to scale its MDI-QKD–based quantum secure communication technologies across Europe. The funding supports QBird’s NEXUS project, expanding hardware efficiency, production capacity, and network orchestration software.

Fujitsu and SC Ventures have launched Qubitra Technologies, a UK-based joint venture building quantum and quantum-inspired applications for financial services alongside a marketplace platform connecting the global quantum ecosystem, with first deployments expected in 2026.

Jefferies removed Bitcoin from a key Asia-focused portfolio, citing long-term concerns that future advances in quantum computing could undermine the cryptography securing the network, signaling a shift toward evaluating digital assets based on technological resilience rather than near-term market factors.

PsiQuantum is collaborating with Airbus to develop and test fault-tolerant quantum algorithms for aerospace applications, focusing on computational fluid dynamics. The partners published research demonstrating quantum lattice Boltzmann methods for simulating realistic aerodynamic flows.

SEALSQ and Kaynes SemiCon have signed a term sheet to form SEALKAYNESQ Ltd, an India-based joint venture focused on secure semiconductor design, testing, and post-quantum personalization aligned with India’s national security and semiconductor strategy.

Project Eleven raised a $20 million Series A led by Castle Island Ventures at a $120 million valuation to build tools that help digital asset networks plan and execute multi-year transitions to post-quantum cryptography.

SEALSQ entered exclusive, non-binding negotiations to make a minority investment and potentially acquire a majority stake in Quobly, in a proposed multi-stage transaction that could total around $200 million.

Equal1 raised $60 million in a funding round led by the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund to accelerate deployment of its silicon-based Bell-1 quantum server and scale toward datacenter-ready quantum computing.

Hitachi Solutions Create has launched DoMobile Ver.5 in Japan, integrating post-quantum cryptography from 01 Quantum to secure remote access communications against future quantum-era attacks. The update makes DoMobile the first remote access platform in Japan to offer built-in, NIST-standardized PQC protection.

The G7 Cyber Expert Group released a nonbinding roadmap urging financial institutions and regulators to begin an early, risk-based transition to post-quantum cryptography, warning that long migration timelines and “harvest now, decrypt later” risks require action well before quantum attacks are feasible.

EVENTS.

Jan. 26-27 -- QuARC 2026, hosted by MIT’s Center for Quantum Engineering (CQE) in partnership with MIT’s Interdisciplinary Quantum Information Science and Engineering (iQuISE) student organization, will be held at the Omni Mount Washington resort in New Hampshire.

Jan. 27-28, 2026 -- Qubits 2026 D-Wave is bringing its annual user conference, Qubits, to Boca Raton, Florida. The event will be held at The Boca Raton resort.

Jan. 29 - Feb. 2, 2026 -- Isfahan University of Technology is hosting Quantum Frontiers in Science and Technology, a five-day, two-part program that integrates foundational education in quantum sensing with a research-focused conference on cutting-edge quantum technologies.

March 16-20 -- Quantum Resources will be held in Tokyo, Japan. The conference brings together leading experts and emerging voices in the field to explore the latest theoretical insights, operational applications, and future directions of quantum resource theories.

March 24 -- Quantum Security & Defence -- Taking place at the Palais des Congrès de Paris, this half-day event convenes industry, government, and research leaders to address quantum security and defence challenges, including quantum-secure communications, certification paths, and practical deployment strategies amid the rising Quantum-AI era.

March 24 -- Convergence Quantum II (CQII) hosted by The Convergence Center for Applied Quantum Computing at The Engine in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA, defines the next generation of drug discovery through applied quantum use cases, biopharma insights and investor perspectives, 

April 6-8 -- International Conference on Quantum Communications, Networking, and Computing (QCNC 2026) -- Taking place in Kobe, Japan, this IEEE-hosted conference covers advances in quantum communications, networking, computing, cryptography, and related systems, featuring research presentations and industry discussions across key tracks in the field.

April 9–11 -- TQCEBT 2026 -- Hosted at CHRIST University’s Pune Lavasa Campus in India, this interdisciplinary event explores quantum computing advancements alongside emerging business technology applications, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and business leaders.

Apr 22–23 -- Mathematics & Physics Frontiers 2026 in Frankfurt, Germany is an international forum uniting mathematicians, physicists, engineers, data scientists, and technology innovators from across the globe to explore groundbreaking advances at the intersection of theory and application.

April 27-30 -- The Quantum Matter International Conference & Expo (QUANTUMatter2026) will take place at the Barceló Sants Hotel in Barcelona. The conference to foster the incubation of new ideas & collaborations at the forefront of quantum technologies, emerging quantum materials and novel generations of quantum communication protocols, quantum sensing and quantum simulation.

June 4-5 -- Q2B Tokyo 2026 will be held exclusively in-person and presented in Japanese and English, with real-time interpretation.

June 16 -- France Quantum -- the premier event showcasing the French Quantum ecosystem to the world.

June 22-24 -- IQT Nordics: Oslo, Norway

June 24-26 -- Quantum. Tech World: Boston, Mass

June 25-26 -- Quantum.Tech World -- Empowering Quantum, AI & HPC at Enterprise -- Scale, co-located with Quantum.Tech World will be held at Encore Boston Harbor in Boston, United States.

June 25-26 -- Quantum.Tech World -- Empowering Quantum, AI & HPC at Enterprise -- Scale, co-located with Quantum.Tech World will be held at Encore Boston Harbor in Boston, United States.

July 1-3 -- The 2026 IEEE International Conference on Quantum Control, Computing, and Learning (IEEE qCCL 2026) will take place from Wednesday to Friday, July 1-3, 2026