When we backed IQM in 2019, it was a laboratory spin-out with a brilliant team and a long road ahead of it. During the early days, our conviction rested on a fairly simple belief: that quantum would become one of the foundational computing technologies of this century, and that the world-class team with unique intellectual property would matter far more than the mood of any given funding year. Seven years later, IQM is about to go public on NASDAQ in a few weeks as Europe's clear quantum leader.
We have always believed in the future of quantum computing. That’s why we have supported the State of Quantum report since its first edition. Through the report we wanted to have an honest picture of how the field was really progressing.
Now in its fourth edition and published by IQM with The Quantum Insider, the report is the most grounded read on the market. It draws on three sources that rarely come together: data on every quantum computer sold since 2021, a survey of more than a hundred senior people actually buying and building quantum across Europe, the Americas and Asia, and a set of in-depth interviews with the practitioners running quantum systems inside national labs, universities and large companies, as well as quantum specialist investors. The result is a picture built on hard evidence of how the market is behaving, which is what makes it worth anyone’s time - especially if you are in the business of quantum.
Writing the afterword for this year's edition gave me a strong reason to consider the findings properly, and three of them stand out from the point of view of a technology- and startup investor.
One: from science project to genuine market
For years, quantum funding rode largely on promises about what these machines might one day do. 2025 was the point when that began to really change. Capital raised in quantum computing reached a record $8.3 billion over 2025, roughly five times the 2024 figure. At the same time, the number of deals held steady at around 45 against 46 the year before, so the surge came from much larger cheques.
Capital is increasingly flowing to the companies that can show real progress, the ones delivering actual systems and measurable results, while those still selling distant roadmaps find the money harder to come by. You can find the same maturity in the wave of quantum companies now heading for the public markets, IQM among them, since a business only invites this level of scrutiny when it believes it has something solid to stand behind. The signal is hard to miss: quantum has crossed from science project to genuine market, and the most serious money in the room is treating it accordingly.
Two: the smart early bets are the picks and shovels
In the California gold rush, the people who made dependable returns were rarely the prospectors panning the rivers but the merchants selling them picks and shovels, and quantum is shaping up much the same way.
The reason lies in the open hardware race. There are several competing ways to build a quantum computer, but none have yet won. Every one of those machines, however, depends on the same supporting technology around it, and that is precisely where the report locates the real bottlenecks:
- The rival machines do not speak the same language, so connecting them to a company's existing systems takes slow, custom engineering every time.
- The software is still built for physicists rather than for the ordinary engineers a business would actually like to put on the problem.
- The machines are not dependable enough, falling short of the always-on reliability companies expect from anything they run day-to-day.
All of these live in the technology that surrounds the chip, the picks and shovels of the quantum economy, and our view is that going forward they make the far smarter early bet. A company that cracks the connection problem or the reliability problem gets paid regardless of which modality eventually wins, and this turns an uncertain race from a risk into something closer to an advantage. Tellingly, fewer than one in ten quantum companies founded last year were building the chip at all, and we expect this pattern to continue.
Three: the payoff is coming, and the early movers will take it
So when do the expectations on quantum turn into real money? The report points to the moment these machines become powerful and dependable enough to beat ordinary computers at problems that matter, which most roadmaps place between 2029 and 2031 for fault-tolerant quantum computing. We expect the first large scale commercial wins in areas like drug discovery and new materials, financial modelling, and logistics.
Getting there needs two things the report keeps returning to: the connecting software that would let a normal IT team plug a quantum computer in as easily as they use the cloud today, and a mature supply chain for the specialist parts every machine relies on, from extreme cooling systems to the cabling that links them together.
The report also makes clear that most organisations are not yet ready. On the Quantum Readiness Index scale, the global average for customer base sits at 58 out of 100, which means plenty of interest but not enough of it turned into a real, owned capability. We have seen this film before. The companies that missed the early window in AI are now paying a premium for ground that earlier movers took less expensively. The years before quantum proves itself are when that position gets taken.
What are we doing about it?
None of this is abstract for us. The thesis that took us into IQM in 2019, that quantum would become foundational and that a great team with strong intellectual property would outlast the hype cycles, is the same one we are applying now as the company reaches the public markets.
We also continue spending our time on the layer the report points to: the software that makes these machines usable, the components that let them scale, and the founders building the connective tissue the whole industry will need whichever hardware modality comes out on top.
Read the State of Quantum 2026 report here.
