There’s a brand-new way to play quantum computing… and it’s worth a serious look

- By Chris Wood, Chief Investment Strategist at RiskHedge Two weeks ago, a brand-new quantum computing stock began trading on the NYSE.

Infleqtion (INFQ) went public via a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called Churchill Capital Corp X.

The stock opened at $14.25 on February 17 and traded as high as $17.51 on its first day. It’s since pulled back and is trading around $12.40—with a market cap of about $2.24 billion.

Infleqtion is a leader in neutral atom quantum computing—an emerging dark horse in the quantum race.

Well, now it’s public. And I think it’s worth a serious look.

Here’s why…

Founded on Nobel Prize-Winning Science

Infleqtion’s story starts at the University of Colorado Boulder, where professor Dana Anderson—working alongside two Nobel Prize-winning scientists in the field of laser cooling and atomic physics—spent years figuring out how to control individual atoms using lasers.

In 2007, Anderson took that research out of the lab and founded a company called ColdQuanta. In 2022, the company rebranded as Infleqtion to signal its shift from pure research to real-world commercialization.

Today, Anderson serves as the company’s Chief Science Officer. And the physics he helped pioneer at UC Boulder now sits at the heart of everything Infleqtion builds—from quantum computers to atomic clocks to gravity sensors.

So this isn’t a company that stumbled into quantum. It is quantum, built from the ground up on some of the most important physics breakthroughs of the past several decades.

Infleqtion now employs more than 130 PhD physicists and engineers and holds over 230 patents, with offices and labs in Boulder and Louisville (Colorado), Chicago, Madison (WI), Oxford (UK), and Melbourne (Australia). And it’s already shipped quantum systems to customers on multiple continents.

A CEO who knows what investors need to see

One thing that immediately sets Infleqtion apart from the pack is who’s running the show.

Most quantum computing companies are led by brilliant scientists with deep technical knowledge, but who know next to nothing about what it takes to build a successful publicly traded company. That’s not a knock on them in any way—it’s just reality.

Matt Kinsella, CEO of Infleqtion, is different. He comes from the world of finance and investing. As Managing Director at Maverick Ventures—a VC fund focused on early and growth-stage companies—Kinsella spent two decades investing in frontier tech. That’s where he discovered Infleqtion (then ColdQuanta) and fell in love with its neutral atom technology.

He was the first investor in Infleqtion in 2018 and has been on the board ever since. He joined the company full time as CEO in April 2024.

The significance of this is easy to underestimate. Kinsella sat on the other side of the table. He knows what investors need to see in terms of milestones, transparency, financial discipline, and commercial traction. He speaks our language fluently. And he’s building a company to win—not just the technology race, but the investor confidence race too.

When Kinsella talks about evaluating Infleqtion through the lens of “technology risk, execution risk, and financing risk”—the three factors he says he always weighs in deep tech—he’s showing us the thinking of a seasoned investor. That kind of clarity about risk is extremely rare at the helm of an early-stage frontier tech company.

The only publicly traded “neutral atom” quantum company

Infleqtion is the only publicly traded neutral atom quantum company in existence.

Other neutral atom players—like QuEra Computing, Atom Computing, and Pasqal—remain private.

So if you want to invest in the neutral atom approach to quantum computing through the public markets, Infleqtion is your only option today.

And as I covered in Part III of our quantum mini-series, neutral atoms are emerging as one of the most compelling approaches to building practical, scalable quantum computers. Here’s the quick version of why:

Scientists build neutral atom qubits from regular atoms, like rubidium and cesium, that carry no electric charge—they’re “neutral.” They cool these atoms down to near absolute zero using lasers, then hold them in place using “optical tweezers” (another type of laser) in a vacuum chamber, where each atom functions as a qubit to perform quantum calculations.

The magic is in what the neutral atom approach enables:

Scalability. Because the atoms have no charge, you can pack lots of qubits into a tiny space—up to 1,600 physical qubits so far in Infleqtion’s systems, with a path to millions. And because they’re controlled by light rather than wires, you don’t have the rat’s nest of cables and electrodes that makes scaling superconducting systems so painful. Perhaps most importantly, adding more qubits to a neutral atom system is just easier than adding to a trapped ion system, and much easier than adding to a superconducting system. For all these reasons, neutral atom systems are much more scalable than other approaches.

Room-temperature operation. Only the atoms themselves need to be cooled. The rest of the system operates at room temperature. There’s no need for those giant, expensive, power-hungry “golden chandelier” dilution refrigerators you need for superconducting systems. So neutral atom systems are cheaper to operate and easier to deploy in labs and data centers. This enhances their scalability.

Long coherence times. Neutral atom qubits can hold onto their quantum superpowers more than 1,000X longer than superconducting qubits. They’ve shown coherence times on the order of 40 seconds in some setups. So they can complete more operations before errors creep in.

Complete (or all-to-all) connectivity. Every qubit can interact directly with every other qubit. Think of it like a party where everyone can talk to everyone else. Superconducting setups, on the other hand, are like a game of telephone where messages must pass person-to-person down a chain—introducing the potential for garbled communication (errors) at every handoff. This matters because many quantum algorithms require lots of qubits to interact with each other in complex patterns. Complete connectivity means you can run these algorithms more efficiently with fewer errors.

More than a one-trick pony

Something else that makes Infleqtion special: it has multiple shots on goal.

Many quantum plays are essentially one-product companies—burning cash while racing to build a universal fault-tolerant quantum computer that’s still at least several years away from broad commercial utility. If that race goes badly, or takes longer than expected, there’s not much to fall back on.

Infleqtion has three distinct lines of business: quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum software.

This diversification is a genuine competitive advantage. While the quantum computing side of the business develops, the sensing and software side are already generating real revenue today. For the nine-month period through September 30, 2025, Infleqtion generated $15.99 million in product revenue and $5.69 million in service revenue.

Ticker: The atomic clock that’s already winning

Infleqtion’s crown jewel when it comes to the current commercial business is an atomic clock called Tiqker. Here’s why it matters:

Our modern world runs on GPS—not just for navigation, but for timing. Your bank’s transactions, your city’s power grid, the data centers running AI workloads, the cell towers connecting your calls—all of it relies on GPS signals to stay synchronized.

The problem is that GPS is increasingly vulnerable to attack. Russia has been conducting a string of GPS-jamming operations since it invaded Ukraine. In a real military conflict, GPS can go dark fast.

Tiqker is an atomic clock that’s 10,000X more precise than traditional microwave-based cesium clocks, and it keeps time accurately for up to seven days without any GPS signal at all. It’s compact, rack-mounted, and field-deployable—unlike the room-sized atomic clocks of the past.

The US Department of Defense (DoD) has already awarded Infleqtion $11 million related to Tiqker’s optical clock technology. The British Royal Navy has conducted what the company says are the world’s first sea trials of an optical atomic clock aboard a submarine.

And in December 2025, Infleqtion announced a strategic partnership with Safran Electronics & Defense—a major aerospace and defense supplier—to integrate Tiqker into its trusted synchronization systems for defense, aerospace, and telecommunications applications.

Blue-chip customers and non-dilutive government funding

Speaking of real-world traction—Infleqtion’s list of customers and partners reads like a who’s who of the most important organizations in defense, science, and technology.

Its partners and customers include DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), NASA, major defense contractors SAIC and Lockheed Martin, Nvidia, the UK National Quantum Computing Centre, and other allied government entities in the UK, Japan, and Australia.

Meanwhile, a substantial portion of Infleqtion’s funding has come in the form of non-dilutive government grants and contracts. That’s money that doesn’t require giving up equity. It funds R&D while leaving more of the company’s upside in shareholders’ hands.

Recent highlights include:

• A $17 million NASA contract for a quantum gravity gradiometer designed for space deployment

• A $6.2 million Department of Energy ARPA-E award for quantum-enhanced energy grid optimization

• A $2 million US Army contract related to its Linchpin AI program

• The $11 million DoD award for its Tiqker precision timing work I mentioned earlier

Nvidia (NVDA) partnership

I want to highlight the Nvidia relationship because it’s probably underappreciated.

In October 2025, Infleqtion and Nvidia announced a partnership to deploy a quantum supercomputing system at the Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park. The system integrates Infleqtion’s Sqale quantum computers with Nvidia’s GPU-accelerated systems via Nvidia’s NVQLink technology—creating a unified hybrid quantum-classical architecture for real-time computing.

Earlier, in 2024, Infleqtion and Nvidia collaborated on what is believed to be the world’s first materials science demonstration using logical qubits—a landmark moment in the road to practical quantum computing.

These things matter because when Nvidia partners with you, it’s a genuine vote of confidence in your technology and roadmap.

Flush with cash after $550 million SPAC deal

One of the big three risk factors to weigh when evaluating deep tech is “financing risk”—the risk that the company runs out of money before it achieves its goals, or reaches milestones to attract additional capital.

Infleqtion just took that risk largely off the table for years to come.

The company raised more than $550 million going public. Combined with its ongoing (and growing) government contract revenue, Infleqtion now has the cash runway to execute on its plans for years without needing to come back to the market hat in hand.

Those plans include a 30 logical qubit (error corrected) quantum system this year, and scaling to 1,000 logical qubits by 2030—a utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computing system. Infleqtion says it expects to achieve quantum advantage—where quantum outperforms classical systems on real-world tasks—by 2028.

Important risks to consider

It’s not all roses of course when it comes to Infleqtion’s story. In the investing world, it never is—especially for frontier tech.

The quantum computing side of the business is still early-stage. Infleqtion has demonstrated 12 logical qubits with error detection as of late 2025. That’s genuinely impressive. But a practical fault-tolerant quantum computer is still years away across the industry, not just at Infleqtion.

When it comes to raw gate fidelity (accuracy), trapped ion systems like IonQ’s still have the edge today. Neutral atoms are closing the gap fast, but it’s important to acknowledge they’re not there yet.

A big chunk of Infleqtion’s revenue currently comes from government contracts, which carry their own risks: funding priorities can shift on whim, appropriations can be delayed, and contracts expire. For example, three UK government contracts representing roughly 36% of Infleqtion’s 2024 revenue expired in 2025. The company says growing revenue from US and Australian contracts are offsetting that, but this is certainly something to keep in mind.

And, like all early-stage frontier tech companies, Infleqtion is burning cash. The $550 million runway is substantial, but not infinite. Execution against an ambitious technical roadmap always carries risk.

The bottom line

Infleqtion is a genuinely unique company in the quantum computing space. And there are lots of reasons to like it.

• It’s the only publicly traded neutral atom quantum company.

• It’s the only quantum pure-play with meaningful commercial operations in both computing and precision sensing.

• It was built on Nobel Prize-winning physics.

• It’s led by a CEO who knows how to build a company investors can believe in.

• It has multiple shots on goal and ways to win.

• It has real revenue, real customers, and real partnerships with some of the world’s most important organizations in defense and technology.

• It just raised $550 million to fund its path to quantum advantage.

Am I saying this is a sure thing? No.

Am I saying everyone reading this should go out and buy the stock? No.

What I am saying is that if you’re interested in this stuff, Infleqtion is probably worth your time checking out.

P.S: We just released The Ultimate Guide to Investing in Quantum Computing (2 Stocks to Buy, 1 to Sell). Read it here.

_____________________________

Chris Wood is Chief Investment Strategist at RiskHedge. To get more ideas like this from him, check out his substack Grow or Die.