D-Wave completed its planned SPAC merger last week, the third quantum computing startup, after Rigetti and IonQ, to go public via SPAC within the last year
Yet another quantum computing company has gone public via SPAC. — D-Wave completed a planned merger on Monday with DPCM Capital …
Context & Ripple Effects
D-Wave has now closed its merger with DPCM Capital, completing the path it laid out in February when it announced plans to raise $340M at a $1.2B valuation on the NYSE — see its earlier $340M NYSE listing plan. That makes it the third quantum computing company to take the SPAC route within a year, following IonQ's ~$2B SPAC merger and Rigetti's own deal.
The significance is less about any single company than about the exit window: quantum hardware startups with long development horizons and heavy capital needs now have a public-markets template, one D-Wave has been building toward since raising $23.1M back in 2015 as a private company.
First-order effects
- D-Wave gains public-market access to capital while committing to keep developing the quantum annealing technology it has pursued for over 20 years — now under quarterly scrutiny from public shareholders rather than private backers like those from its earlier venture rounds.
Second-order effects
- With IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave all trading, quantum computing becomes a comparable public sector where investors can price the three approaches against each other, pressuring each to show commercial traction rather than research milestones alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, government funding enters the picture on new terms: sources report IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave are in talks to give the U.S. Commerce Department equity stakes in exchange for more than $10M each in funding — a structure where public listings make equity-for-grants deals executable, and where such announcements have already moved shares of D-Wave (+33%), Rigetti (+30%), and IBM (+12%).
The trend: Quantum computing companies are exiting through SPACs faster than their technology matures, converting long-horizon R&D bets into publicly traded equities that then attract government capital on equity-sharing terms.