Canadian company Xanadu Quantum Technologies, Inc., a nine-year-old firm with a penchant for naming software platforms after Beatles songs (PennyLane, Strawberry Fields), is the latest quantum computing firm going public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), in this case a deal with Crane Harbor Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: CHAC) that values Xanadu at more than $3 billion.
Upon closing of the transaction, shares of the combined company are expected to trade on the Nasdaq Stock Market and on the Toronto Stock Exchange (Xanadu is based in Toronto).
Xanadu was an early Nvidia partner, and last year raised $100 million in funding. While the company was more known for the popularity of its open source PennyLane programming software for the developer community, it has been making great progress on its plans to build a photonic quantum computer called Borealis, which is expected to have up to 100,000 physical qubits and up to 1,000 logical qubits in its fault-tolerant form by 2029.
This deal should make Xanadu not only the first publicly-traded, pure-play quantum company building a photonic quantum machine, but also the first Canadian pure-play quantum computing firm to reach the stock markets (although D-Wave Quantum was born in British Columbia, and identified as Canadian once upon a time).
This deal was announced yesterday, but I had a bit too much on my plate covering the Chicago Quantum Summit to write something up. For more details, here’s the press release from Crane Harbor, and a good explanation of this merger and the broader risks and confusion related to SPAC deals at Quantum Insider.
This merger represents at least the seventh quantum-related SPAC deal, following IonQ, Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum, Zapata AI, Horizon Quantum Computing, and Infleqtion, with those last two yet to have their public market debuts. The record of success following these deals is pretty mixed, with IonQ leading the pack, and D-Wave holding its own. Rigetti’s disappointing returns from its SPAC merger resulted in a restructuring and lingering uncertainty, though it has gained renewed attention during the quantum stock boom of recent months. Zapata reportedly went bust last year, but apparently survives in some firm, and recently had some news about its IP strategy.
Anyway, that does not make for a sterling track record for quantum SPAC deals. We’ll see how Xanadu fares.
Image by Freepik, generated by AI.
Quantum News Nexus is a new 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.
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