French Quantum Company Pasqal Starts Trading on Nasdaq
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French quantum computing company Pasqal has arrived on the Nasdaq. Shares in Pasqal Holding SA started trading today under the ticker “PSQL,” with warrants under “PSQLW.” The listing comes out of a merger with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) whose shareholders approved the deal last Tuesday. Pasqal says it has roughly $360 million in cash available following the closing. The company was valued at $2 billion at the last funding round.
The money is earmarked for expanding manufacturing and the global rollout of its quantum processing units (QPUs), for development work toward fault-tolerant quantum computing, for its cloud and software platform, for tighter integration with classical high performance computing, and for scaling up sales. “We have deployed quantum systems in real operating environments and connected our processors to the computing infrastructure customers already use,” said CEO Wasiq Bokhari, adding that being publicly traded gives the company a stronger platform to grow faster.
What Pasqal Does
Pasqal was founded in 2019 in Palaiseau, a suburb of Paris, with Nobel laureate physicist Alain Aspect among its co-founders. The company works with neutral atoms: individual atoms are held in laser-generated lattices and used as qubits. Pasqal pitches the approach as energy efficient and scalable, and says its machines run in standard data center conditions.
Seven QPUs are deployed today, according to the company, with three more in production. The machines are also reachable through the cloud, and Pasqal says more than 25 commercial and research applications run on them, in fields such as energy, financial services and materials science. One system sits at the Jülich research center in Germany. Pasqal positions itself as a full-stack provider, selling hardware, software and cloud access alike.
How the SPAC Deal Came Together
The combination was announced in the spring. It valued Pasqal at roughly $2 billion before the cash injection, with a pro forma market capitalization of about $2.6 billion. In parallel, the company raised around $200 million from private investors, TechCrunch reported, among them Parkway, Quanta Computer, LG Electronics and shipping group CMA CGM. The Bleichroeder SPAC itself went public earlier this year, with Cohen & Company Capital Markets as lead book-running manager. Lazard advised Pasqal, Cantor Fitzgerald advised Bleichroeder.
European deep tech companies have increasingly taken the shell company route to the United States, drawn by higher valuation multiples and deeper capital markets. Pasqal follows Finnish-German rival IQM, which over the summer became the first European quantum company to list on the Nasdaq at a $1.9 billion valuation.
France remains an anchor point throughout. Pasqal stresses that its headquarters and legal domicile stay French, state investment bank Bpifrance holds a board seat, and a secondary listing on Euronext has been announced. As TNW reported from the SEC filings, foreign investors taking significant stakes also need clearance from the French economy ministry. The same filings put 2025 revenue at about 16.5 million euros and warn that broad commercial traction for quantum technology may never materialize.
A Joint Venture With Saudi Arabia
Shortly before the listing, Pasqal announced a deal in the Gulf. Together with Saudi investment platform Eleven Ventures, it is setting up a commercial joint venture called Pasqal Arabia to deploy, operate and commercialize quantum systems in the kingdom and the wider region. Several systems are slated for installation over the coming years, alongside efforts to build local expertise. Eleven Ventures founder Prince Abdulaziz Bin Turki Bin Talal will chair the board.
The venture ties into Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia’s program to diversify its economy and establish itself as a hub for artificial intelligence and high performance computing. The partnership was unveiled around the Saudi state visit to France at the start of the week, during which a delegation toured Pasqal’s headquarters and production site. “We believe that quantum today is where AI stood a few years ago, on the edge of changing everything,” the prince said in the announcement.
