4 August 2026

^{Images: Pasqal}

 

French quantum computing company Pasqal is preparing to make one of the biggest capital-market leaps yet by a European quantum business.

It plans to go public through a merger with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II, a special purpose acquisition company listed on Nasdaq. Announced in March 2026, the proposed transaction values Pasqal at $2 billion before new capital and is expected to close during the second half of the year, subject to regulatory and shareholder approval.

The listing is more than a financing event. It will test whether public investors are ready to back a distinctly European contender in a field dominated by American technology groups — and a quantum architecture that differs fundamentally from the one pursued by IBM and Google.

Those companies build quantum processors from superconducting electrical circuits. Pasqal builds neutral-atom quantum computers, using individual atoms held in place and arranged by tightly focused laser beams known as optical tweezers.

Both approaches remain works in progress. Pasqal’s proposition is that nature may have supplied a more uniform and potentially scalable building block than the semiconductor industry can manufacture.

 

Pasqal’s origins in French quantum research

 

Pasqal was founded in 2019 as a spin-out from the Institut d’Optique near Paris. The scientific work behind the company, however, stretches back several decades.

Its five co-founders were Georges-Olivier Reymond, Alain Aspect, Antoine Browaeys, Thierry Lahaye and Christophe Jurczak. Together, they combined experimental physics, neutral-atom research, technology commercialisation and specialist quantum investment.

Aspect is the most widely known. In 2022, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for experiments involving entangled photons and violations of Bell inequalities. Their work established the reality of quantum entanglement and helped lay the foundations for quantum information science.

The more direct technological roots of Pasqal lie in subsequent work with cold atoms at the Institut d’Optique’s Charles Fabry Laboratory.

Reymond completed his doctorate there and contributed to a 2001 experiment demonstrating the controlled trapping of an individual atom in a microscopic optical trap. Browaeys, Lahaye and their colleagues later developed ways to control arrays of neutral atoms and make them interact through a phenomenon known as Rydberg blockade.

In 2009, the researchers observed the blockade between two individually trapped atoms and subsequently used the mechanism to generate entanglement between two atoms. The principle is central to Pasqal’s technology: exciting one atom into a high-energy Rydberg state changes whether nearby atoms can be excited, creating the controlled interactions needed for quantum simulation and computing.

The group went on to build progressively larger arrays. In 2016, its researchers reported a programmable quantum simulator using up to 30 individually controlled atoms. Later experiments arranged dozens and eventually hundreds of neutral atoms in configurable two-dimensional structures.

The possibility of commercialising the research had been discussed as early as 2012. By 2018, the technology had matured and American companies were showing growing interest in neutral-atom research. Jurczak, a physicist turned investor and co-founder of specialist fund Quantonation, helped convert the laboratory project into a company.

Pasqal spent its first year inside the Institut d’Optique, giving the young business access to established laboratories and expertise while it began turning experimental apparatus into commercial hardware.

 

Pasqal’s funding and technology milestones

 

Pasqal’s development since then has combined quantum hardware, software and industrial partnerships.

The company raised €25 million in a Series A round in 2021. In January 2022, it merged with Dutch quantum software company Qu&Co, adding algorithms and application development to its hardware capabilities. That year, Pasqal also began making its neutral-atom systems accessible remotely and announced plans to offer them through Microsoft’s Azure Quantum platform.

A €100 million Series B round followed in 2023. Pasqal subsequently delivered systems to European high-performance computing centres, including GENCI and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission in France, Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany and CINECA in Italy.

The CINECA installation, delivered in February 2026, contains more than 140 qubits and is being integrated with the Leonardo pre-exascale supercomputer. The hybrid setup is designed to let researchers combine conventional high-performance computing with specialised quantum calculations.

Pasqal has also expanded into Canada, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

In 2025, it acquired Canadian photonics company AEPONYX. The deal brought expertise in photonic integrated circuits — chips capable of controlling and routing light — into the group. Pasqal expects the technology to help reduce the size and complexity of the optical systems required to operate larger neutral-atom processors.

A further €170 million private funding round was announced alongside the Nasdaq transaction in March 2026. Investors included Parkway Venture Capital, Quanta Computer, LG Electronics and CMA CGM, while existing backers included Temasek, the European Innovation Council Fund, Aramco and Quantonation.

The company employs approximately 300 people. Wasiq Bokhari is now chief executive, leading the transition from a research-led startup into an international hardware and services business. Reymond serves as chief strategic alliances officer, while Browaeys remains chief scientific officer.

 

How Pasqal’s neutral-atom quantum computers work

 

A neutral-atom quantum computer uses individual atoms as quantum bits, or qubits. Because atoms of the same isotope are naturally identical, they do not inherit the manufacturing variations found in qubits fabricated on semiconductor-style chips.

Pasqal uses rubidium atoms. The atoms are laser-cooled inside a high-vacuum chamber and captured by optical tweezers. Pasqal can then arrange them in different two-dimensional patterns.

Additional laser pulses excite selected atoms into Rydberg states, in which their outer electrons move much farther from the nucleus. This allows neighbouring atoms to interact and perform quantum operations.

The ability to change the layout of the atoms is one of the architecture’s main attractions. Instead of forcing every problem onto connections permanently embedded in a chip, the geometry of a neutral-atom array can be adapted to the mathematical structure of a calculation.

Pasqal’s platform can also operate as an analogue quantum simulator. Rather than translating every calculation into a long sequence of digital gates, the processor can be configured so that the physical interactions between its atoms reproduce aspects of another quantum system.

This makes neutral atoms particularly relevant to problems in materials science, chemistry and many-body physics, where the aim is often to model how large numbers of quantum particles interact.

 

Neutral atoms versus IBM and Google’s superconducting qubits

 

IBM and Google make qubits from superconducting circuits patterned onto chips. At sufficiently low temperatures, those circuits behave as engineered quantum systems controlled using microwave pulses.

The approach has important advantages. Superconducting gates are fast, fabrication draws on techniques developed by the semiconductor industry, and both companies have demonstrated increasingly sophisticated forms of quantum error correction. Google’s Willow processor and IBM’s expanding processor families show how far the architecture has progressed.

Its physical demands are considerable, however. Superconducting processors must operate inside dilution refrigerators at temperatures of only a few millikelvin — colder than interstellar space — to protect their quantum states from thermal noise. Manufactured qubits can also vary slightly from one another, requiring substantial calibration and control infrastructure.

Pasqal’s neutral-atom systems avoid the large dilution refrigerators required for superconducting processors. That does not mean the atoms themselves operate at room temperature: they must be cooled to microkelvin-scale temperatures and maintained in an ultra-high vacuum. But the overall machine can sit in a room-temperature environment, with lasers providing the local cooling and control.

Neutral atoms bring their own compromises. Their quantum gates are generally slower than superconducting gates, and precise optical control becomes harder as arrays grow. Atom loss, laser stability, gate fidelity and the speed of repeated calculations remain engineering challenges.

Pasqal must therefore show that its relatively natural route to larger qubit arrays also delivers the reliability needed for useful computation.

Qubit numbers alone do not settle the comparison. A smaller collection of high-quality, error-corrected qubits may be more valuable than thousands of physical qubits that accumulate errors.

 

Targeting real-world industrial computing problems

 

Pasqal is not trying to replace conventional servers. Its strategy is to integrate quantum processors into hybrid computing environments, where they handle narrowly defined parts of larger calculations.

The company is targeting three broad areas: optimisation, quantum simulation and machine learning. Within them, it is looking for industrial problems that become prohibitively difficult as the number of variables or particle interactions increases.

Its work with EDF illustrates the approach. As electric vehicles and intermittent renewable energy complicate electricity networks, utilities must forecast demand and decide when large numbers of vehicles should charge. Pasqal, EDF and French supercomputing organisation GENCI have executed an energy-demand forecasting experiment using more than 100 qubits.

The project did not establish that a quantum computer can already outperform the best classical electricity-management systems. It showed that a relevant industrial problem could be mapped to and run on neutral-atom hardware — a necessary step before meaningful performance comparisons become possible.

Another EDF project explores the ageing of materials inside nuclear power stations. Modelling how atomic-scale interactions contribute to cracks and degradation under radiation is computationally demanding because classical simulations must simplify aspects of many-body quantum behaviour.

An analogue quantum processor, whose atoms reproduce selected features of the system being studied, could eventually perform parts of that modelling more directly.

 

Has Pasqal achieved quantum advantage?

 

Quantum advantage generally means using a quantum computer to solve a useful problem faster, more accurately or more efficiently than the best available classical method.

Pasqal reported an important materials-science result in March 2026. Its researchers used 256 neutral-atom qubits to simulate the behaviour of TmMgGaO₄, a frustrated magnetic material, and compared the output with physical measurements from collaborators including the US National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

Pasqal describes the work as industrial quantum advantage in materials science. The underlying research is currently available as a preprint and provides evidence that a neutral-atom processor can model a real material rather than an abstract benchmark.

The broader advantage claim requires caution, however. Matching experimental observations does not by itself prove that the quantum system has outperformed every relevant classical technique in cost, speed or accuracy.

Classical algorithms are also continuing to improve. In May 2026, researchers at the Flatiron Institute reported that a new tensor-network method could efficiently reproduce dynamics that earlier research had presented as beyond the practical reach of classical computation.

Every quantum advantage claim must therefore be tested against the best available classical method, not yesterday’s benchmark.

 

From EDF to Aramco

 

Pasqal is pursuing applications in pharmaceutical research, financial modelling, logistics, energy and manufacturing. Its clients and partners have included BMW, Airbus, Thales, Crédit Agricole CIB, LG Electronics and CMA CGM, although the scope and commercial value of these relationships vary.

Its most visible commercial deployment is at Aramco’s data centre in Dhahran.

Installed in November 2025 and launched commercially in May 2026, the system controls 200 programmable qubits. It supports what Pasqal and Aramco describe as Saudi Arabia’s first quantum computer and the Middle East’s first commercial quantum-computing-as-a-service platform.

Pasqal has also delivered a quantum computer with more than 140 qubits to CINECA in Italy for integration with the Leonardo supercomputer. These installations are significant because they move neutral-atom processors out of Pasqal’s own laboratories and into operational computing environments.

They do not yet prove broad commercial quantum advantage. Much of the immediate work remains preparatory: identifying suitable problems, developing algorithms, training internal teams and integrating quantum processors with existing infrastructure.

 

What the Nasdaq SPAC deal could mean for Pasqal

 

Pasqal’s May 2026 investor presentation estimated that the proposed SPAC combination could place approximately $649 million in cash on its balance sheet, assuming no redemptions by Bleichroeder shareholders or repayments associated with the transaction.

That figure includes $250 million in committed convertible financing and remains conditional on the transaction’s completion.

The capital is intended to support hardware development, international installations and Pasqal’s route towards fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Its current roadmap targets more than 10,000 physical qubits and more than 200 logical qubits by 2029. Logical qubits combine multiple physical qubits to detect or correct errors. These targets are projections, not demonstrated capabilities.

Pasqal’s transaction documents acknowledge the risks. The company is pursuing an emerging technology, faces substantial engineering and commercialisation challenges and may not achieve widespread market acceptance.

That is the unavoidable tension behind the Nasdaq listing. Pasqal has moved further than many quantum startups in installing physical machines and giving industrial organisations access to them. But executing a relevant calculation on quantum hardware is not the same as solving it faster, more accurately or more economically than a classical system.

The Nasdaq transaction would give Pasqal substantial capital to attack that gap. It would also expose the company to public-market expectations that can move much faster than experimental physics.

Pasqal’s larger bet is that neutral atoms offer a way through quantum computing’s central bottleneck: creating enough controllable, sufficiently accurate qubits to perform valuable work. Its industrial partnerships are helping identify which problems deserve that machinery. The next test is whether its optical tweezers can turn those experiments into repeatable computational advantage.

 

 

Further reading on MoveTheNeedle.news:

Can a second dimension solve trapped-ion quantum computing’s scaling problem?

QuantumDiamonds wins €76 million backing for quantum semiconductor inspection facility

Quobly wants to bring semiconductor-scale manufacturing to quantum computing