Quantum News Nexus

IonQ has announced yet another acquisition, its second of the week and its eighth since Niccolo de Masi took the reins as CEO almost one year ago, this time picking up cloud infrastructure software firm Monument, Colorado-based Seed Innovations.

The company said in a press release announcing the deal that the acquisition is expected to close this week. Financial terms were not disclosed. The Seed Innovations deal was announced just two days after IonQ said it would acquire chip manufacturer SkyWater Technology. IonQ also this week announced the completion of its Skyloom acquisition, which was announced in November. Besides the three mentioned in this paragraph, IonQ also acquired Capella Space, Oxford Ionics, ID Quantique, Vector Atomic, and Lightsynq during the past year–somewhere around $4 billion worth of deals, with most of them being all-stock transactions (The exceptions: The Oxford Ionics deal reportedly involved about $10 million in cash, and the just-announced SkyWater deal proposes to give SkyWater shareholders $15 in cash and $20 worth of IonQ shares (NYSE: IONQ) for each share of SkyWater (NASDAQ: SKYT) stock they own.)

The release about the latest deal further stated, “At IonQ, Seed will deploy its expertise in machine learning (ML), advanced software architecture, and cloud migration to accelerate IonQ’s work in developing enterprise grade, AI-driven software layers that will be essential for managing and scaling complex quantum workloads.

“This acquisition expands IonQ’s software capabilities as we build the world’s only enterprise grade, full-stack quantum platform,” said Frank Backes, president Quantum Infrastructure, IonQ. “Seed Innovations’ expertise in machine learning and automated scaling architecture will be instrumental in optimizing performance across our quantum applications.”

As with a lot of what IonQ has been up to lately, there is a strong federal government angle here, as 13-year-old Seed Innovations was the recipient of a $67.8 million contract with the US Department of Defense (now called the Department of War) that appears to be ongoing as part of the Advana Edge AI project. IonQ under de Masi has gone all-in on aligning itself with the Trump administration and positioning itself as a tight partner with the federal government. 

IonQ’s stock price has been down about 12.5% since the beginning of this week, sitting at $43.15 around mid-day Thursday.

Image by DC Studio on FreePik.

Quantum News Nexus is a site from freelance writer and editor Dan O’Shea that covers quantum computing, quantum sensing, quantum networking, quantum-safe security, and more. You can find him on X @QuantumNewsGuy and doshea14@gmail.com.