Pasqal Since the EIC Accelerator: On Nasdaq, Short of 300 Qubits

When the European Innovation Council selected Pasqal in its October 2020 cut-off, the company was a year and a half old and still registered at 2 Avenue Augustin Fresnel in Palaiseau, the street of the Institut d'Optique it had spun out of, according to the French official gazette BODACC. Its project took the name of the street and of the physicist: FRESNEL, a plan to industrialise a 300-qubit quantum processor, "Fresnel300", and make it available through the cloud by 2024, according to CORDIS.

Six years later Pasqal is a listed company. Pasqal Holding SA began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker PSQL on 28 August 2026, after a merger with the blank-cheque company Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II that left it with about $360 million in cash, according to the company's closing announcement filed with the SEC and The Quantum Insider. Its machines sit in computing centres in France, Germany, Italy and Saudi Arabia. None of them has the 300 qubits the EIC project promised.

A Listed Company With a Falling Share Price

The listing came in two steps. On 4 March 2026 Pasqal announced a €170 million private round from new investors including Parkway, Quanta Computer, LG Electronics and CMA CGM, with the EIC Fund, Temasek, Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Ventures and ISAI staying in, plus a convertible financing of about €170 million ($200 million) tied to the SPAC merger, together "at least EUR 340 million" at a $2 billion valuation, according to its press release and its lawyers, Orrick. The same release said Pasqal expected to remain a French legal entity headquartered in Palaiseau and planned a second listing on Euronext Paris in 2026 or 2027. Quantum Computing Report put the possible gross proceeds at over $600 million, assuming no SPAC shareholder redeemed; the cash at closing was about $360 million.

The first trading day was strong, and accounts of it differ. The Quantum Insider reported a close of $19.11 on 28 August, up 95.2% on the SPAC's previous close of $9.79, while Blockonomi wrote that the shares rose as much as 73% and closed about 40% higher. The fall afterwards is not in dispute: the stock lost 58.35% in its first full week to close at $7.96 on 4 September, according to Longbridge, and stood at $5.88 on 16 October 2026, a market value of about $1.25 billion, according to iO Charts. Bpifrance disclosed an 11.4% stake in the first week, Longbridge reported.

The Technology: Atoms Held by Light

Pasqal builds quantum processors from single rubidium atoms, held in a vacuum chamber by tightly focused laser beams called optical tweezers, with each trapped atom acting as one qubit, according to Microsoft's documentation for its Azure Quantum service, which lists a 100-qubit Pasqal QPU of the "Orion Beta generation" under the name FRESNEL. The FRESNEL report on CORDIS lists the claimed advantages over rival approaches: atoms are identical by nature, so there are no manufacturing irregularities, and the processor works without the dilution refrigerators that superconducting qubits need. Its machines run mainly in "analogue" mode, in which the atoms' interactions directly model a physical or optimisation problem, rather than as a general gate-based computer; the company's own SEC filing describes a strategy "to pursue analog quantum computing prior to reaching fault tolerant quantum computing".

Scaling the number of atoms is the core claim of the approach. In June 2024 Pasqal reported trapping more than 1,110 atoms in about 2,000 traps and rearranging an 828-atom array, according to its press release and The Quantum Insider. That was a laboratory result about trapped atoms; neither source describes a 1,000-qubit computer available to customers.

What FRESNEL Promised, and What the Record Shows

The European Commission's list of the 7 October 2020 EIC Accelerator pilot winners names PASQAL of Palaiseau, with no partner company, for FRESNEL with blended finance, a grant plus EIC equity. CORDIS records a grant agreement signed on 1 March 2021, a project from 1 April 2021 to 31 March 2023, an EU contribution of €2,495,062.50 and a total cost of €3,564,375.

The objective on CORDIS made four concrete commitments. From 2023 Pasqal would supply 100-qubit processors to high-performance computing centres, naming the CEA's Très Grand Centre de Calcul in France and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany as interested buyers. The Fresnel300 series would be "ready by 2024" and offered through Pasqal's cloud. Électricité de France and Total were named as enterprises interested in using it. The final periodic report, for April 2022 to March 2023, says: "We successfully achieved our objectives: two QPUs, the QaaS development (cloud and full software stack) and the first real world use-case in Financial Services." It does not mention 300 qubits.

1. 300-qubit Fresnel300 QPU series, ready by 2024Not achievedThe largest announced Pasqal machine has 200 qubits, installed at Aramco in November 2025 (The Quantum Insider, Verdict). No 300-qubit product has been announced.
2. 300-qubit QPU available through the cloudNot achievedThe Pasqal cloud offers Orion, a "100+ qubit" QPU; the Google Cloud listing of May 2025 is the same platform (The Quantum Insider). On Azure, the machine called FRESNEL has 100 qubits (Microsoft).
3. 100-qubit QPUs for the CEA and Jülich from 2023Delivered lateFirst machine delivered to GENCI and the CEA in June 2024 (The Quantum Insider); Ruby and Jade, both over 100 qubits, inaugurated on 13 November 2025 (GENCI, CEA).
4. Cloud platform and software stackDeliveredReported done on CORDIS; pay-as-you-go access to Orion is on sale on the Pasqal cloud page.
5. First real-world applicationDeliveredCORDIS cites a Crédit Agricole CIB publication on financial optimisation, also reported by Tech.eu.
6. Use by EDF and TotalNot announcedNeither the CORDIS report nor the company's 2026 listing announcements name EDF or Total as customers.

FRESNEL produced a working industrial machine, and Pasqal recognised its first QPU sales revenue in 2025 from the GENCI and Jülich contracts, according to its proxy statement filed with the SEC, which also lists the €2,495 thousand EIC Accelerator grant for "the development and industrialization of its next-generation neutral-atom quantum processing units, the 'Fresnel QPU'". But the headline promise of the award, a 300-qubit product by 2024, has not been met two and a half years after that deadline, and the HPC centre machines arrived about a year later than the objective said.

What Pasqal Has Built Since the Award

The private money grew with each round. A €25 million Series A in June 2021 was followed in January 2023 by a €100 million Series B led by Temasek, in which the EIC Fund came in as a new investor alongside Wa'ed Ventures and Bpifrance's Large Venture fund, according to Tech.eu and The Quantum Insider. That is how the equity part of the blended EIC award shows up in the record; the amount the EIC Fund invested has not been disclosed. The two reports disagree on the total raised by then: more than €125 million according to Tech.eu, more than €140 million according to The Quantum Insider. The EIC Fund still holds shares: the EIC Fund portfolio lists Pasqal, and under the SPAC agreements it designated a board member, Jean Raby, who chairs the audit committee, according to the SEC proxy statement.

The deployments followed. After the two EuroHPC machines in France and Germany, Pasqal delivered a 140-qubit system to CINECA in Bologna in February 2026, co-funded by EuroHPC and Italy's research ministry, according to The Quantum Insider and Pasqal. In Saudi Arabia, the 200-qubit Aramco system in Dhahran was launched as a commercial quantum computing service in May 2026, The Quantum Insider reported. At its listing the company counted seven QPUs deployed and three in production.

Pasqal also bought companies. It acquired Qu&Co, a quantum software firm and itself an EIC Accelerator winner, in 2021, and impaired that acquisition when it closed Pasqal Netherlands B.V. on 24 June 2025, according to the SEC proxy statement (see rasph's article on Qu&Co). It also took over Aeponyx, a Montreal designer of photonic integrated circuits with 27 employees, according to CFNEWS. The dates disagree: CFNEWS lists the deal on 3 June 2025, while the proxy statement says the Aeponyx assets were acquired in July 2024. The proxy statement adds that the deal came with undertakings to the Canadian government that restrict how Aeponyx staff and technology can be used.

Headcount roughly tripled. Pasqal had about 100 employees in January 2023, according to The Quantum Insider; the French register gives a band of 200 to 249 for 2024, according to the official company search service; the March 2026 release said "over 275 people" and the proxy statement "approximately 300". Leadership changed along the way. Co-founder Georges-Olivier Reymond was chief executive at the Series B; Loïc Henriet spoke as chief executive when the Aramco system was installed in November 2025; Wasiq Bokhari, chairman from 2024 according to CEOWORLD, became chief executive of the listed company, with Henriet as chief technology officer, according to the proxy statement and Quantum Computing Report.

The Money

Pasqal's French accounts were filed under confidentiality for several years. The figures that are public show the scale of the build-up. PASQAL SAS reported no revenue and a net loss of €158,797 for 2020 and revenue of €578,694 with a net loss of €12,359,818 for 2022, according to the INPI financial ratios and the official company search service. The group's consolidated statements in the SEC proxy statement show revenue of €3.5 million in 2024 and €16.5 million in 2025, of which €7.5 million was QPU sales, €6.5 million QPU-related services, much of it a French defence procurement agency (DGA) contract, and €2.6 million cryostat sales. Blockonomi also reports the €16.5 million figure. The net loss rose from €48.5 million in 2024 to €92.4 million in 2025, with cash of €73.8 million at the end of 2025.

The first half of 2026 brought revenue of €4.9 million, up 14% on a year earlier, and a net loss of €53.2 million, according to RTTNews and Grafa. Grafa reports an operating loss of €59.2 million that included €27.3 million of share-based payments and €10.2 million of one-off deal costs, booked and awarded business of €70.4 million at 30 June, and cash of about €312.9 million on 27 August after the merger.

Why Europe Should Care

The Commission's Quantum Europe Strategy of 2 July 2025 aims to make the EU a global leader in quantum by 2030, citing tech sovereignty and security, and announces a Quantum Act proposal for 2026. Pasqal is one of the few European companies that has sold whole quantum computers to European public computing centres: its machines at the TGCC, Jülich and CINECA were bought under EuroHPC programmes, so EU and national money funded both its development and its first customers. The EIC Fund's board seat and Bpifrance's 11.4% stake keep public European investors inside the listed company.

The listing also shows the limits of European capital. Pasqal went public through a Cayman Islands SPAC on a US exchange, with a Euronext listing only planned, and its largest deployed system serves Aramco in Saudi Arabia.

The Verdict

Pasqal has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements, regulatory filings and EU project data, linked throughout.