Pasqal listed with $360m and 90.57% of the SPAC's public shareholders took their money out

Pasqal’s ordinary shares started trading on Nasdaq under PSQL on Friday 28 August 2026, the day after the French neutral-atom company completed its combination with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II. The joint release puts the outcome at “approximately $360 million of cash available at closing”.

The interesting number is in the SPAC’s own filing. Bleichroeder’s public shareholders holding 26,039,602 of 28,750,000 Class A ordinary shares “validly elected to redeem”. That is 90.57 per cent of the public float taking the cash rather than the shares, leaving 2,710,398 public shares standing.

Where the $360 million came from

The proxy’s sources table had the money arriving from three places: $290.6 million from the trust account, $144.6 million of Legacy Pasqal’s own cash as at 30 April 2026, and $250.0 million from a private financing agreed in March. Against that sat $36.0 million of estimated transaction fees and expenses, and $649.1 million reaching the balance sheet.

Every one of those figures assumes nobody redeems, and the filing says so: where actual amounts were not knowable, they are Bleichroeder’s “good faith estimate”. So the table cannot be used to rebuild the real $360 million, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What it does give is a price for the trust. The proxy puts the illustrative per-share redemption price at approximately $10.10 as at 30 April and approximately $10.17 as at 30 June. At those figures the 2,710,398 public shares that did not redeem are worth roughly $27 million, and the trust line also carries $12,250,000 of deferred underwriting commission payable to the IPO underwriters on closing.

So the trust did not vanish. About a tenth of it survived. The rest of the $360 million is Pasqal’s own balance sheet and $250 million of new debt, which is a different thing from a company being handed money by the public market.

The financing is debt with a ratchet

The $250 million did not arrive as equity. Its terms set the floor under the share price.

Investors subscribed for $312.5 million of principal in senior unsecured convertible bonds for an aggregate purchase price of $250.0 million, which the proxy describes as “reflecting a 20% original issue discount”. The bonds pay “either 10% per annum payable in cash semi-annually or 12% per annum in Payment-in-Kind”, and convert at the holder’s option at $12.00 a share, initially into 26,041,667 shares.

Then the reset. Six months after closing, if the 20-day volume-weighted average price is below the conversion price then in effect, the conversion price adjusts to the greater of that average and $7.80. Should the shares be weak in late February 2027, the same $312.5 million of principal converts into considerably more stock.

The same investors also took 32,552,083 Investment Warrants, exercisable immediately at $12.00 and expiring five years from closing.

Put together, the bonds and warrants alone represent 58,593,750 shares at or below $12.00, against a deal that valued Legacy Pasqal at $2,000,000,000 pre-transaction on an exchange ratio of 22.74.

The first session went the other way

PSQL opened at $16.98 on 28 August, traded between $13.08 and $20.10, and closed at $19.11 on 3,675,424 shares. Bleichroeder had closed at $9.79 the day before, so the first session was up 95.2 per cent on the last SPAC price and 91.1 per cent on the $10.00 deal reference.

It did that in a bad week for everyone else in the sector. Over the same period, from the 21 August close to the 28 August close, D-Wave fell 16.67 per cent, Rigetti 12.95 per cent, IonQ 12.62 per cent and Quantum Computing Inc 8.63 per cent, while the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.85 per cent. All four closed 28 August well below their 52-week highs: IonQ down 53.7 per cent from its, Rigetti 73.2 per cent, D-Wave 63.7 per cent, Quantum Computing Inc 68.5 per cent.

D-Wave’s worst day was Wednesday 26 August, down 9.51 per cent, the session after it disclosed that chief financial officer John Markovich would retire on 2 September with Greg Golkov as acting CFO.

One caution about reading anything into that: it is a single session, on a public float of 2,710,398 shares plus whatever the sponsor and legacy holders are free to sell. A thin float and a 95 per cent move are the same sentence.

What the market was buying

Pasqal’s audited accounts stop at 31 December 2025. On those numbers, total revenue for 2025 was €16,468 thousand against €3,508 thousand in 2024, and the loss for the year was €92,355 thousand against €48,498 thousand. QPU sales made up €7,457 thousand of the 2025 revenue, against nothing the year before.

There are no 2026 interim figures in the proxy, so the newest accounts anyone had on listing day were eight months old.

The company says it has seven quantum processing units deployed and three more in production, employs about 300 people, serves more than 25 clients and partners, and has raised more than $300 million privately. Its named customers include Saudi Aramco, Crédit Agricole CIB and LG Electronics. New Pasqal has committed to use reasonable best efforts to dual-list on Euronext Paris within twelve months of closing.

Its own roadmap page carries a target that has already come and gone: “a targeted demonstration of Quantum Advantage by the end of Q1 2026”, alongside a goal of 200 or more logical qubits by 2029. That first date passed five months before the company listed, and the page has not been updated to say what happened.