Quantum Computing's Money Moment: $5B Valuations, White House Summits, and a Wave of IPOs
Two Israeli quantum computing startups are in talks to go public at valuations that would have seemed absurd three years ago. Quantum Art, which builds quantum processors using trapped-ion technology, and Classiq, which develops a software layer for quantum algorithm design, are each negotiating SPAC mergers targeting valuations of up to $5 billion, according to a July 12 report from Ynetnews.
Neither company has disclosed significant revenue. That detail used to matter. In 2026, it apparently doesn’t.
The quantum computing sector is in the middle of a funding surge that looks less like a technology cycle and more like a land grab. Investors who missed the AI wave are determined not to miss the next one, and quantum — with its genuine long-term potential and its convenient distance from near-term revenue expectations — fits the bill perfectly. The numbers are eye-watering: two companies with limited commercial history, targeting valuations that would make them worth more than many profitable software companies with hundreds of millions in annual revenue. The bet is entirely on what these companies might become in five or ten years, not what they are today. It is the purest expression of venture-scale thinking currently available in public markets.
The Israeli quantum ecosystem
Quantum Art was founded by Tal David and focuses on trapped-ion quantum processors, a hardware approach that competes with superconducting qubits (Google, IBM) and topological qubits (Microsoft). The company has raised roughly $200 million in private funding and positioned itself as Israel’s most advanced quantum hardware play. Trapped-ion qubits have a key advantage over the superconducting variety: they hold their quantum state longer. The tradeoff is speed — ion-based operations are slower than superconducting ones. Quantum Art’s bet is that coherence time matters more than gate speed for the kind of applications that will matter first: simulation, optimization, and eventually error-corrected computation.
Classiq, founded by Nir Minerbi, takes a different approach. Instead of building quantum computers, Classiq builds the software that lets programmers write for them without needing a physics degree. Its platform abstracts away the qubit-level complexity and handles circuit optimization automatically. Think of it as the compiler layer for quantum computing — unsexy but essential, and potentially more valuable than any individual hardware platform if quantum computing follows the same trajectory as classical computing, where operating systems and development tools captured more value than the chips themselves.
Classiq’s platform addresses a real bottleneck. Writing quantum algorithms today requires specifying individual gate operations on specific qubits, accounting for connectivity constraints and noise characteristics that vary by hardware vendor. It’s assembly language programming, essentially. Classiq’s compiler takes a high-level functional description and produces optimized circuits for whatever backend you’re targeting — IBM, IonQ, Rigetti, or eventually Quantum Art. If quantum computing goes mainstream, something like Classiq’s approach becomes necessary infrastructure.
If either deal closes by the end of 2026, Quantum Art would become Israel’s first publicly traded quantum company. Both are structured as SPAC mergers rather than traditional IPOs, which tells you something about the urgency. SPACs are faster, require less historical financial disclosure, and are generally favored when companies want to hit public markets while the narrative is hot. The tradeoff is less scrutiny during the listing process, which means investors are flying with less information than a traditional IPO would provide.
The IPO wave
These aren’t isolated deals. Quantinuum, the quantum computing company formed from the merger of Honeywell Quantum Solutions and Cambridge Quantum, went public earlier in 2026 at a $1.68 billion valuation. IonQ and Rigetti are already publicly traded — IonQ went public via SPAC in 2021 at a $2 billion valuation and has since seen its market cap swing between $1 billion and $8 billion depending on the sector’s narrative momentum. D-Wave has been public for years. The difference now is the scale of the valuations relative to revenue. Quantum Art and Classiq are reportedly targeting $5 billion each — roughly triple Quantinuum’s IPO valuation — despite having far less commercial history than any of the incumbents.
What’s changed is the macro narrative. Quantum computing spent two decades as a research curiosity discussed at physics conferences and ignored by everyone else. Then Google claimed quantum supremacy in 2019 with its Sycamore processor, completing a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken a classical supercomputer 10,000 years. IBM challenged the claim almost immediately — classical algorithms later did the same calculation in hours — but the symbolic threshold had been crossed. IBM then published a detailed hardware roadmap with specific qubit-count milestones and error-correction targets. The U.S. government started treating quantum as a national security priority, imposing export controls on quantum technologies and funding domestic quantum research through the CHIPS Act and defense appropriations.
The White House held a quantum summit in July 2026, signaling that quantum has moved from “interesting research area” to “strategic technology” in the minds of policymakers. When policymakers get interested, money follows. Venture capital has poured in behind the government commitments. And public market investors, seeing the AI boom they mostly sat out, are looking for the next thing with genuine long-term potential and a narrative that makes the wait for revenue feel like patience rather than denial.
Where the technology actually stands
It’s worth separating the funding narrative from the engineering reality. Quantum computers in 2026 can do things that classical computers cannot, but those things are narrow and mostly useless for commercial applications. Error rates remain high. Qubit counts are climbing — IBM’s roadmap targets 100,000 qubits by 2033 — but nowhere near the millions of physical qubits needed for fault-tolerant, general-purpose quantum computing. Most practical applications that would justify these valuations — drug discovery, materials science, financial modeling — require error-corrected logical qubits built from hundreds or thousands of physical qubits each. We’re probably five to ten years away from machines that can run commercially relevant workloads at scale.
What quantum computers can do right now is serve as specialized co-processors for specific optimization and simulation problems. D-Wave sells annealing-based machines to logistics companies and financial firms for narrow optimization tasks. IonQ and Rigetti offer cloud access to their processors for research and experimentation. None of these generate the kind of revenue that supports $5 billion valuations. The bet is entirely on the future.
Companies like Classiq are betting that the software layer needs to be built now, even if the hardware isn’t ready, because building a quantum development ecosystem takes time. It took classical computing decades to go from assembly language to Python. The quantum software stack needs to follow a compressed version of that trajectory, and waiting until the hardware is mature to start building tools would guarantee missing the window. It’s a reasonable bet. It’s also a bet that requires investors to wait years for a payoff they can measure in dollars rather than papers published.
The risk is that the funding cycle gets ahead of the technology cycle, valuations become detached from progress, and the whole sector contracts when investors realize the timeline is longer than the hype suggested. This has happened before — in AI during the 1980s “AI winter,” in cleantech during the late 2000s, in dot-com companies with no revenue during the late 1990s. Quantum computing has all the same preconditions: big promises, long timelines, revenue that doesn’t match valuations. The counterargument is that this time the government is backstopping the research with defense and infrastructure spending, so the sector can survive a public-market correction even if retail investors get burned.
What to watch
The next twelve months will tell the story. If Quantum Art and Classiq close their listings at or near the reported valuations, expect a flood of quantum SPACs and IPOs through 2027. If the deals stall or reprice downward, the sector’s funding window may close faster than anyone expects, and the companies that haven’t already raised will find themselves in a much colder environment.
The technology itself will keep advancing regardless of what public markets do. Peking University researchers just demonstrated a quantum chip capable of generalized computational spectroscopy for open quantum systems — the kind of incremental but real progress that doesn’t make headlines but accumulates into capability over time. University of Southampton scientists unveiled a technique for building ultra-thin material stacks that could enable new quantum device architectures. Riverlane, the quantum error-correction company, marked its tenth anniversary still betting that useful quantum computers are coming. These are the signals that actually matter in the long run.
The IPO frenzy is interesting, but it’s a story about money, not about physics. The physics will take as long as it takes. The question for investors is whether their patience horizon — or their fund’s redemption terms — allows them to wait that long.
In the meantime, the smart money in quantum computing isn’t going to the highest-valuation startups. It’s going to the enabling infrastructure: error correction, control electronics, cryogenic systems, and the software tools that will be necessary regardless of which qubit technology wins. The shovel sellers, as always, make money before the gold miners do. Classiq’s approach — build the compiler, not the computer — is a version of this bet. Whether $5 billion is the right price for that bet is a question the public markets are about to answer.
There’s also a geographical angle worth noting. Israel has quietly built one of the world’s densest quantum computing clusters outside the United States and China. The country’s defense and intelligence community has long invested in quantum sensing and cryptography. The startup ecosystem has spun out of those military research programs the same way Israel’s cybersecurity industry grew out of Unit 8200. Quantum Art and Classiq are the most visible names, but they’re part of a broader ecosystem that includes roughly two dozen quantum-focused startups, multiple university research centers, and a government that views quantum computing as a strategic priority comparable to its early investments in cybersecurity and AI. Whether that ecosystem can support two $5 billion public companies is an open question, but the fact that the question is being asked at all tells you how far quantum computing has come from the days when it was discussed almost exclusively in physics departments and theoretical computer science journals.
