Chapter 4: State of Play

It’s time to leave the science and engineering behind, and turn towards the ‘real’ world, full of companies and employees and investors and financialization. Quantum computing is no longer a pet project of academia; it is a proper industry. Companies in this space have become increasingly mature and capable of raising large amounts of capital. In 2025 alone, the quantum industry raised $4.9 billion in venture capital money , and around $12.6 billion in total capital, a roughly 6x increase from 2024 . There are several public quantum computing companies, with several more coming along the way. At the time of writing, the Trump administration has pledged an additional $2 billion in investment , making US government support of the industry explicit. Governments in the EU and Australia have also made quantum computing a key plank of future technological development strategy . There are enormous expectations and stakes for the field, a far cry from the situation from even 5 years ago.

Why is this happening, and why now? Why is this sleepy, academic field suddenly an enormous sink for public, venture, and retail capital? The short answer is that the field A) has tremendous capacity for absorbing capital, given the massive technological hurdles it must overcome; B) has an enormous amount of hype swirling around it.

But quantum computing is not a ‘natural’ fit for most of these types of capital. Despite the growing maturity and size of the industry, the technology is extremely nascent, the applications uncertain, and the revenues miniscule! Let’s go down the list: funding high-risk technological bets is indeed the purview of government agencies like the NSF, DOE, and DOD (through innovation arms like DARPA). As a result, much of the initial research funding for quantum academic labs came from these organizations - and government funding remains an important capital source to this day. Then, quantum startups and spin-outs began to be founded in the 2000s, and attracted both this public funding and venture capital investments.

But historically, VC money hasn’t typically gone to industries like quantum computing. Despite its roots in funding the California semiconductor companies (Intel, Fairchild, etc.), the vast majority of venture dollars have gone to capital-light software companies, which promise investors huge returns per dollar invested. Hardware companies, by comparison, have significantly greater capital needs, considering the cost of fundamental R&D, equipment, manufacturing, etc. Quantum computing is an extreme example of this, where the technical and market risk of the industry is still extremely high, even decades in. And yet, in the past two years especially, massive amounts of capital have piled into the field from venture capital firms. Consequently, the universe of quantum startups has exploded, consisting of over 200 firms targeting different hardware platforms, applications, and places in the software/hardware stack.

It’s also a bit of a historical aberration that there are several public, pure play quantum computing companies. Historically, public markets have been reserved for companies that have a history of profitability, and going public was a way to simultaneously reward existing investors with liquidity; raise additional capital from the bigger public markets; and expand access to the company’s growth to the common retail investor (sounds a bit socialistic, no?). Over time, these expectations have shifted. In the mid-2010s, startups like Facebook, Uber, and Snap went public with no profits! Uber’s IPO enabled the company to finally consolidate market share, raise prices, and become profitable. Snap meanwhile, has tread water, never really achieving profitability.

In the early 2020s, we saw companies with even more speculative and uncertain business models go public, typically via a ‘Special Purpose Acquisition Company’, or SPAC. A SPAC is a public entity which raises money from investors, typically at $10 per share. It then goes out and tries to use its big pot of cash to find a target to take public. The SPAC often also finds some private investors who will co-invest in the target company, and brings it to its shareholders for a vote. If the vote succeeds, the firms ‘de-SPAC’, merging into one publicly traded entity. The SPAC shareholders can either get shares of the company, or their original money back, plus interest . Advocates for SPACs tout that the process is lower cost and lower risk compared to the traditional IPO. Detractors point to a number of facts: That SPAC sponsors (the people organizing the SPAC) get a huge bucket of shares for a very small initial investment, misaligning their incentives from the SPAC shareholders and that historically de-SPAC’ed companies have performed very poorly once they’ve gone public . Ostensibly this all happens because SPACs have lightened regulatory scrutiny than IPOs, and generally target more speculative and less mature businesses.

Several quantum companies went public during this 2021-22 SPAC boom – IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave, raising about a billion dollars cumulatively. To me, what makes these companies singular, especially in comparison to their public cohort, is their lack of revenue. There are commonly accepted ways to translate a company’s income into estimates of its total enterprise value: most simplistic is the idea of a price to earnings ratio (P/E ratio). A typical P/E ratio might be something like 10 to 30x, which sort of makes sense. If you were to buy the company for a price that was 20x its earnings, you’d expect to return your investment in 20 years with no growth, and hopefully faster if the business continues to grow.

These public quantum companies not only have negative earnings (they are unprofitable), but have virtually no revenue, and likely won’t be making substantial amounts anytime soon. This is in stark contrast to even the most rickety tech IPOs of recent years. Snap, which went public in 2018, had about half a billion dollars in revenue its first year of being public (it was unprofitable, but that’s a different story - investors were paying for growth!); IonQ had about $10 million.

This trend has continued even today. After a few quiet years for IPOs and SPACs, 2026 has been a boon for new entrants into public markets: Infleqtion, Xanadu, Horizon Quantum, and Quantinuum have all gone public (Quantinuum notably via a traditional IPO!). While their revenue figures are not substantial, their enterprise valuations range between single digit and tens of billions of dollars.

So quantum computing is an outlier in both public and private markets. I can point to a few interrelated reasons why this is the case:

• For venture capitalists, we are at a unique time where their typical bread and butter – software companies – are being devalued due to the rapid deployment of AI. Silicon valley VCs have quickly reoriented toward all things hardware (deep-tech, hard-tech, or ‘American Dynamism’ are all hallmarks of this). Quantum computing, with its incredible technical hurdles, huge potential market size, and possible national security implications, becomes catnip to a VC in 2026. Furthermore, VCs have a documented pattern of (and incentive to partake in!) trend following: The VC profit model depends on one out of ten (or so) of their portfolio companies becoming huge, runaway successes. They are perfectly happy investing in nine stinkers if that tenth company is a hit, and can return the value of the fund and then some. This naturally means they are highly motivated by FOMO, or the fear of missing out. If their peers are clustering into an industry, a VC would see it as being extremely high risk not to also be in that industry. This helps explain the waves of VC money flowing into crypto, then AI, and now quantum.
• For governments, quantum computing clearly has applications for the intelligence community, with its possible applications for encryption and code-breaking. But there’s more than just that. Much of the west, America especially, experiences existential dread about the concentration of the semiconductor industry’s expertise in Taiwan, and the downstream national security and economic implications of this. I reckon that, in the eyes of many in the US government, the development of quantum computing could present a strategic hedge against this dependence. I think this is a hard story to buy, given that quantum computation will always work in concert with conventional computing, and certainly never displace it for general tasks – but I do think it’s a story that Washington DC believes. For the EU and Australia, the incentive toward developing a local, highly-skilled tech industry is much more straightforward (and plausible).
• I hesitate to translate the behavior of retail investors into a coherent narrative. I couldn’t tell you why the average retail investor chooses to invest in IonQ instead of NVIDIA (let alone IonQ versus D-Wave), but I can make some guesses. It’s been well documented that we live in a time of increased perception of economic precarity, due to (pick one of) AI deployment/increased inequality/stagnant wages/poor consumer sentiment. This then translates into people wanting to take big asymmetric bets in order to try and make huge profits (and escape the so-called permanent underclass). We see this in the increasing popularity of sports gambling, prediction markets, and short-dated options trading, all of which present high leverage opportunities to strike it rich . Couple this with the public valorization and high profile of tech venture capitalists, whose business model is commonly associated with high risk bets on early-stage technologies. To me, putting money into speculative quantum computing stocks is spiritually akin to all of these activities. Sure, you can’t go back in time to get into NVIDIA when it was $10 a share – but maybe IonQ will be the NVIDIA of tomorrow? Worth a shot!
• The quantum computing companies, who have an almost limitless ability to absorb new capital and direct it toward their formidable technical challenges, do their part as well. This is a bit of a hot-button topic, but it is well-understood that quantum computing companies (especially the public ones) are prone to exaggeration about both their technical capabilities and their relevance for real-world use cases. Here’s an extremely non-exhaustive list:
  • We’ve already covered the debacle that is Microsoft’s topological qubit program.
  • There are myriads of papers and press releases that claim some sort of practical business use case for near term quantum computers, none of which stand up to any real scrutiny. Take this HSBC/IBM paper , which found some sort of advantage of using a quantum algorithm on predicting financial data, but only because of the noise in the system? Scott Aaronson has a nice takedown here but the short story is that it’s absolutely bogus, and does not represent any real advantage over classical methods! There’s no shortage of papers like this: IonQ claiming accelerated finite element analysis with Ansys and applications for image processing ; D-Wave optimizing Ford production lines ; Quantinuum saying that quantum natural language processing has promise ; etc., etc. The purpose of these papers are for external consumption, to convince third parties that business adoption of quantum computing is imminent.
  • The industry has at times been extremely aggressive about qubit count projections, typically failing to meet them and adjusting them downwards after the fact. Famously, initial SPAC presentations from companies like IonQ and Rigetti were overly optimistic, predicting thousands of qubits by 2025/6, which certainly hasn’t happened . IBM also fell victim to this, with a 4,000 qubit ‘Kookaburra’ system slated for 2025 (according to a 2022 timeline) -- that has not come to fruition. Given the embarrassing nature of missing deadlines, timelines for these companies and others have been pushed back and de-emphasized. That being said, even today, IonQ says they’ll have 10,000 physical qubits by 2027 ! That’s roughly two orders of magnitude of progress in 18 months. We’ll see if it happens.
  • Short reports* have indicated that IonQ has at times outright lied about its technical capabilities, financial situation, and market prospects. Rumors abound that the company’s acquisition of Oxford Ionics in 2025 was driven primarily by poor internal technical results.
  It’s very difficult for the average person (or even the sophisticated investor) to parse all of this and determine what’s BS or not.

I also want to take a second to explain why all of these companies with substantial technical risk are going public now. Rigetti, IonQ, and D-Wave are sitting on huge amounts of cash from their SPAC events, even years later. This is a great luxury to have when you aren’t selling any quantum computers. But simply being public can be a great asset for a business. It allows a company to use its stock as a component of acquisition deals. We’ve seen IonQ acquire a number of potentially complimentary businesses (most notably Oxford Ionics, a prominent competitor, and Skywater Technology, a semiconductor fab). Additionally, these quantum stocks tend to be incredibly volatile. Since option prices reflect the underlying volatility of a stock, this volatility can be monetized by hedge funds. We’ve thus seen transactions like IonQ’s 2025 issuance of $2 billion in warrants .

State of Play

So where has all this investment gotten the field? Let’s do an overview of the state of the industry. We’ve got a handful of different platforms and dozens (if not hundreds) of startups, all jockeying for position.

In superconducting land, things seem dominated by the big tech giants. Google’s Willow chip has 105 functioning qubits, and they seem to be pretty open about their technical results. IBM’s qubit count is slightly higher ($\sim$150 qubits on their Heron chips), and they are unique in their ability to offer public API access to their systems. IBM has historically used honeycomb connectivity for its qubits, but is moving toward a more standard square grid in its next generation of chips, called Nighthawk. D-Wave recently jumped into the superconducting ring as well, acquiring Quantum Circuits Inc., a superconducting startup that promises lower error rates by utilizing a ‘dual rail’ architecture, which combines two transmon qubits into one unit. There are also several well-funded superconducting startups. Particularly notable is Qolab, a new startup started by several UCSB and Google Quantum alumni, including Nobel prize winner John Martinis. They seem to have a particular vision for scalability in superconducting systems , which has historically been an enormous challenge. French startup Alice and Bob is also quite prominent – their superconducting qubit architecture (called a ‘cat qubit’) is supposed to be more naturally resilient to bit-flip errors, thus reducing the overhead necessary for error correction .

In trapped ion world, the elephant in the room is obviously IonQ. They’ve recently bolstered their technical capabilities by acquiring Oxford Ionics, who holds the record for two qubit gate fidelities, utilizing their electronic control scheme. I’m not particularly clear on how the company will integrate its legacy approach with OI’s very unique electronic architecture (perhaps abandoning their initial efforts altogether?), but it does seem like they hold both some interesting technology and a large reserve of capital they are willing to deploy. Several other trapped ion startups exist, with varying degrees of maturity. Quantinuum, the Honeywell spin-out, is probably the most significant. As an industry outsider, I simply see what people post online (and have discussions with folks in the industry occasionally), but I perceive a bit of cooling enthusiasm for the trapped ion approach. Recent papers working to do time estimates for various decryption tasks have attempted to benchmark for both ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ systems (with ions falling into the later), finding that the time penalty for slow platforms can significantly degrade their utility.

On the other hand, it feels like neutral atoms are on their cultural ascendency. They seem to be a good middle ground between the stable but slow operation of ions, and the fast but difficult to control and scale superconducting domains. Google recently announced it is putting resources into building a neutral atom based team, and startups abound in this space. Atom Computing (to my knowledge) currently holds the record for qubit count, at 1,180 – although it seems that their competitor QuEra has more impressive error correction experimental results (due to better gate fidelities). I noted above that atoms have lots of potential, but have lagged behind their peers simply because of their relative immaturity. This may change soon!

The photonic companies sort of seem to exist in their own world. As I wrote above, there are a great variety of technical approaches here. The most far-along seem to be PsiQuantum, a very well-funded Australian startup, and Xanadu, a Canadian startup. Some of their technical progress has been very impressive, but to my knowledge, no true measurement based quantum computing system has been deployed as of yet. The technical challenges for this subset of the industry are really quite daunting, from single photon generation to reducing photon loss to extremely high bandwidth control.

On the spin qubit front, Intel is the established tech company working in this space, although it’s unclear the extent of their resources they are putting in this direction. There are a variety of spin startups, including Australia’s SQC and Diraq, and the EU’s Groove. Qubit counts here are relatively low (low tens) .

I also want to mention the hodgepodge of startups working on other parts of the quantum stack. Some are focused on being infrastructure providers to the industry: take Maybell Quantum, which makes dilution refrigerators. Others focus on how to translate software to actual gate operations (akin to a compiler), like Q-CTRL. Others sit on the applications side, trying to use existing quantum computers to solve business problems. I generally am extremely skeptical of this last camp, given that I think it’s extremely unlikely that generic business problems are going to be better served by a quantum algorithm than a classical approach, especially in the near term. I don’t want to name names, but there are some truly specious ventures out there.

Because progress is so nonlinear here, it’s hard to tell who, if anyone, is in the proverbial lead. You could imagine a system that is very easy to take to 100 qubits, which then faces enormous challenges networking to systems with thousands of qubits (or perhaps the bottleneck is at 1000, or with control, or error correction, etc.). I think this makes for a very fascinating, if technically opaque, field to follow.

A Bearish Read

We seem to be at the peak of the hype curve for quantum computing. Public quantum stocks cumulatively sit at something around $40-80 billion in total market capitalization (with enormous volatility from day to day). New VCs and investors are pouring into the space, with expectations of getting returns on their investment in the next 5 to 10 years. All of this implies the creation of some short to medium term value being created by these companies. I think this is ultimately unlikely: A) the timeline for dealing with the very integral technical issues involved in scale-up and scale-out (across all platforms) is significant, and seems closer to a decade+ problem; B) real-world applications for these devices are few and far between, and while carefully crafted corporate partnerships can go a long way for generating hype, it’s difficult to actually build revenue and profitability if your customers fundamentally don’t get utility out of your product; C) even putting aside the last issue, who captures the value here? Let me clarify – when a big pharmaceutical company does a drug discovery project, they ostensibly use a bunch of supercomputing resources (chips from AMD and Intel, memory from lots of vendors, system assembled by HPE, etc.). They pay a price for that equipment, sure, but when they discover a new blockbuster drug, they accrue the vast majority of the value. It remains to be seen how that will play out in the quantum space.

I believe the market is suffering from some degree of irrational exuberance here. We have been collectively trained to revere and respect ‘the science’, and technologists are naturally optimistic about the potential of the approaches they are working on. This has made it relatively easy for an industry which is both very difficult to understand and has plausible sounding real-world impacts to become a giant sink for capital. I think what’s interesting (and this is based on my discussions with scientists and engineers) is that many people working in the field either A) are narrowly focused on their particular niche, and assume that the technology will have massive impact; B) know that the larger narratives around quantum computing are hype-based overselling. Unfortunately, in this world, everyone is strongly incentivized to keep this momentum going: The raised profile of the industry enables more funding, more jobs, more research, and more development. If you’re a true believer in the long-term impact or a physicist looking for a stable job, these billions help! No one has the incentive to pull the alarm and talk about the long-term issues facing the industry.

I furthermore worry that the purpose of these recent SPAC and IPO events is not to provide these companies with sustainable long-term funding, but to enable founders, leadership, and investors with easy off-ramps for liquidity. Certainly venture investors are not typically used to operating on timescales of multiple decades, and recognize that today’s market environment is a somewhat unique opportunity.

I don’t mean to portray the folks working in this industry as being ‘evil’ (whatever that really means), although I do think some, especially in leadership positions, are acting in bad faith. I think there are a lot of people in the field trying to do good work and high-quality research. Unfortunately, financialization is a process that can damn even the best of intentions.

On Conceptual Art

Despite being an engineer, I have more than a passing interest in ‘art’, especially the kinds which are (I would say unfairly) maligned by the STEM crowd. There’s one artist I’d like to discuss right now: Richard Serra. Serra was a post-war American minimalist sculptor, famous for his large steel installations. Neither words nor images properly convey the feeling of standing next to (or within) a Serra, particularly his more giant works. These are huge panels or blocks made up of solid steel, both hulking and delicately formed. Sometimes the panels form waves or arcs that loom over you or invite you inside to explore. There’s been a lot written about Serra’s work, its influences, and purposes (cliff notes: he loved going to the San Francisco shipyard as a child, he worked at steel plants as a young man, the sculptures manipulate how a viewer interacts with the environment and space, the art is physical and immediate, etc). I have always appreciated his work not just for these reasons, but also because of how absurd it is. Steel is this tremendously useful material, with human production dating back several thousands of years. We’ve harnessed raw elements to create an industrial, multinational supply chain to generate this multi-purpose material at scale. It goes into our buildings, our machines of war and transport, and our conceptual art. This mad artist has to go and say, what if we use this industrial process to create these unique, hulking forms that provoke thought; that confuse; that delight. Then the supply chain goes and bends to his will – some set of engineers and laborers works to manufacture these incredible shapes, then they get shipped around the world and installed in museums and public spaces for the public to puzzle at. It strikes me as this phenomenal trick that Serra is playing on the world. And that’s not to say that I don’t like it – I love it! What greater dominance can man have over the elements than to take raw materials and turn them into something (pseudo-)decorative? It’s glorious! Both the works themselves and the narrative of their creation is beautiful.

And maybe that’s how I feel about quantum computing. If the applications never pan out; if the algorithms never find real world uses; even if the technical advances end up so niche that the investment was all for naught; to me, it is equal parts awe-inspiring and beautiful that we can manipulate the quantum world with such precision – that we could even think about entangling two particles at will, or fight back against the process of decoherence. Is it worth doing? Perhaps; perhaps not. Nevertheless, I will appreciate the outcomes, not dissimilarly to how I might look at Serra’s steels.



← Chapter 3

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