Europe just put its first quantum computing company on a major American stock exchange. And it did so without leaving home. IQM, a Finnish maker of quantum machines, started trading on Nasdaq this week. The debut was equal parts landmark and reality check.
IQM began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on 2 July under the ticker “IQMX,” the company confirmed. It reached the market not through a traditional IPO but by merging with a US shell company. It walks away with a pro forma cash pile of €337 million.
The milestone is real. IQM is the first European quantum firm to list on a major US exchange. It says it has sold 23 full-stack quantum computers worldwide, more than any rival. Buyers include Italy’s CINECA, Germany’s Leibniz Supercomputing Centre and the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
A Finnish company that stayed Finnish
The more unusual part is what IQM did not do. For years, the playbook for an ambitious European deep-tech firm has been to reincorporate in Delaware, decamp to the US and list there alone. IQM stayed put.
Founded in 2018 as an Aalto University spinout, it still keeps two-thirds of its 420 staff in Espoo, near Helsinki. It also has a large base in Munich. IQM is listing on Nasdaq Helsinki the day after its New York debut too. That keeps state fund Tesi and local pension insurers on the share register. BlackRock chipped in before the debut.
“IQM’s Nasdaq debut is a landmark for European deep tech,” said Tom Henriksson, an early investor at OpenOcean. It proves, he argued, that European companies can reach serious US capital “without relocating their core R&D or ambition.”
A pioneer with real revenue
IQM stands out in a field of loss-makers. It reported €31 million in 2025 revenue and an order backlog above €67 million, rare hard numbers in quantum. By contrast, Honeywell-backed Quantinuum filed for a traditional IPO at up to $20bn despite tiny sales, while US-listed IonQ and Rigetti remain unprofitable.
Chairman Sierk Poetting called the listing “not a change of direction but… an acceleration.” Chief executive Jan Goetz framed it as an inflection point. “Organizations are moving from exploration to implementation,” he said. IQM was entering the market “from a position of strength.”
The catch investors noticed
The market was less sure. IQM’s shares spent most of their first day below the offer price. TechCrunch tied that cool reception to a striking line in the company’s own prospectus: that “large-scale commercial traction of quantum computing technology may never occur.”
That caveat applies to the whole industry. Quantum machines are useful today for narrow simulation and optimisation work. But the “quantum advantage” that would upend drug discovery, finance and encryption has no fixed arrival date. Not even the people building the computers can say when it comes.
The bet is still drawing money. Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are pouring in funding, and Europe is racing to keep pace. French rival Pasqal is lining up its own listing. For now, IQM has planted a flag: a European deep-tech champion can go public in New York and still call Helsinki home. Whether US investors keep backing it is the next test.
