PASQAL closed its first Nasdaq session at $19.11, nearly doubling the value of the last price of its SPAC. But the jump should not be read as a validation of either its valuation or its business model. More than 90% of the public shareholders of Bleichroeder chose to redeem their shares before the merger, sharply reducing the amount of capital actually raised in the transaction.
That detail matters because PASQAL is not entering the public markets as a mature, cash-generating software company, but as a deep-tech industrial player that still needs significant funding to scale. The listing is therefore less a victory lap than a financing step in a longer industrialization process. For the French quantum computing company, the Nasdaq debut is meant to provide the capital base needed to move from technological promise toward industrial deployment.
The market reaction on day one may have been positive, but the underlying message is more cautious: investor enthusiasm did not translate into broad support for the SPAC structure itself. The heavy redemption rate shows that many shareholders preferred to exit rather than back the deal, leaving PASQAL with a much smaller pool of public capital than originally expected.