IBM News & Events

In a regulatory filing, IBM disclosed plans to invest more than $10B over five years to advance its position in quantum, including in R&D, capex, ecosystem partnerships, manufacturing scaling, and M&A. The company said this further enhances its confidence in delivering the first large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029. The company said, "To date, IBM has deployed over 90 quantum systems, including more quantum computers than reported by all other industry players combined. The company has also built a global client and partner ecosystem spanning more than 325 Fortune 500 companies, startups, universities, and government agencies already using IBM's global fleet of quantum computers to tackle scientific challenges across chemistry, biology, materials science, and more. This $10B investment announcement follows last week's Letter of Intent between IBM and the Department of Commerce to build an American quantum chip foundry to accelerate American quantum innovation."

Cognition AI and Modal both landed major new funding rounds this week, underscoring continued investor appetite for AI infrastructure and agentic AI platforms. Cognition AI said it has raised more than $1B at a $26B valuation, while Modal secured $355M in fresh financing led by Redpoint Ventures and General Catalyst, lifting its valuation to $4.65B from $1.1B last fall.Some of the biggest capital raises by private companies this week include:Cognition AI– The company said it has raised more than $1B in a new funding round at a $26B valuation. Venture firms Lux Capital, General Catalyst and 8VC co-led the financing. Publicly-traded companies operating in the same space include Palantir, C3 AI, and IBM.Modal– The AI startup raised $355M in a new round of financing, valuing the company at $4.65B. The company's new round was led by Redpoint Ventures and General Catalyst, which will have a board seat. The Series C round values the company at $4.65B, up from $1.1B in the fall. Publicly-traded companies operating in the same space include Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet.Stord– The consumer experience company announced a $250M Series F funding at a $3B valuation. The round was led by existing investors. Publicly-traded companies operating in the same space include Prologis, Shopify, and Manhattan Associates.Farther– The intelligent wealth management company raised $150M in Series D funding. The round was led by General Atlantic, a leading global investor, with participation from existing investors. Publicly-traded companies operating in the same space include Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, and Robinhood.MidOcean Energy– The liquefied natural gas company formed and managed by EIG announced a $120M equity investment from The Arab Energy Fund. Publicly-traded companies operating in the same space include Cheniere Energy, Tellurian, and Exxon Mobil.Unicorns to watch this week:Safe Superintelligence– Operating in the AI sector, Safe Superintelligence remains a major narrative driver in the ongoing "AI safety vs. capabilities" debate. Publicly-traded companies operating in the same space include Alphabet.Via Transportation– The transit tech unicorn builds software for public transit agencies and on demand mobility systems. Publicly-traded companies operating in the same space include Uber, Lyft, and Trimble.Netskope– The cybersecurity company specializes in Secure Access Service Edge, cloud security, zero trust network access, and CASB/SWG. Publicly-traded companies operating in the same space include Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks, and Cloudflare.Unconventional AI– Positioned as a challenger to Nvidia dominated compute with a radically energy efficient architecture, the company recently raised a $475M seed round at a $4.5B valuation. Publicly-traded companies operating in the same space include Nvidia, AMD, and Intel.Chai Discovery– The AI for molecular programming company closed a $130M Series B, reaching a $1.3B valuation. Publicly-traded companies operating in the same space include Schrodingerand Recursion Pharmaceuticals.IPOs to watch:SpaceX– The company officially submitted its Form S-1 with the SEC to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SPCX. Expected to be the largest IPO in history, the company targets raising up to $80B at a valuation exceeding $2T.Sunshine Silver Mining & Refining Company– The company announced the launch of its initial public offering of 20M shares of its common stock. In connection with the offering, Sunshine expects to grant the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 3,000,000 shares of common stock. The IPO price is expected to be between $13.50-$16.50 per share. Sunshine's common stock has been approved for listing, subject to official notice of issuance, under the ticker symbol "SSMR" on the New York Stock Exchange.Innio– The company announced that it has publicly filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission relating to a proposed initial public offering of its common shares. The timing of the offering, number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. Innio has applied to list its common shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol "INIO." Innio designs, manufactures and services power systems under its Jenbacher and Waukesha brands. The company delivers power for applications including data centers, microgrids, grid stabilization, industrial energy and gas compression.Inspire Brands– The company announced that it has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission relating to the proposed initial public offering of its common stock. Inspire Brands expects to use the net proceeds of the proposed offering to repay outstanding indebtedness under its existing term loan facility and pay offering fees and expenses.Tarsier Pharma Ltd.– The company filed for an initial public offering of its ordinary shares and applied to list its ordinary shares on the NYSE American under the symbol "TARX." The prospectus stated, "Tarsier Pharma is developing TRS01 and TRS02, novel product candidates based on dazdotuftide, a new molecule with a new mechanism of action for uveitis and uveitic glaucoma. We are attempting to address a significant, underserved market opportunity and have engaged closely with the FDA on our clinical development strategy, including a Special Protocol Assessment agreement for our planned pivotal trial... Although we are still early in this journey, I believe we have the technology, the team, the discipline, and the persistence required to build an enduring company.""Private Markets" is The Fly's recurring series of stories on the latest moves in the private sector, largest unicorn companies and initial public offerings to watch. Fly subscribers, add $PRIVATE to your portfolio for alerts on breaking news in the startup and venture capital space.

IBM (IBM) and Red Hat announced Project Lightwell, a $5B commitment backed by new frontier AI capabilities and a global force of more than 20,000 engineers to help enterprises secure open-source software. Together, these investments establish a new model for enterprise use of open-source software, from upstream development through production environments. Project Lightwell will establish an enterprise clearinghouse combined with a force of engineers to identify and fix vulnerabilities at scale. The clearinghouse will serve as a security coordination layer, using advanced AI capabilities to validate and test fixes across an unprecedented volume of open-source code. These capabilities will be offered through commercial subscriptions, allowing enterprises to integrate secure patches directly into their existing software supply chains with enterprise-grade validation and lifecycle management. IBM and Red Hat have already begun collaborating with a select group of early adopters on Project Lightwell, including Bank of America (BAC), BNY (BK), Citi (C), Goldman Sachs (GS), JPMorganChase (JPM), Mastercard (MA), Morgan Stanley (MS), Royal Bank of Canada (RY), State Street (STT), Visa (V) and Wells Fargo (WFC). Project Lightwell builds on IBM and Red Hat's open source, enterprise AI and security, and incorporates learnings from initiatives such as Anthropic's Project Glasswing and OpenAI's Trust Access for Cyber, with a goal of utilizing new IBM agentic security methods to protect the foundational open source layers that underpin modern enterprise and AI systems.

Welcome to the latest edition of "Quantum Leap" where The Fly decodes news and activity in the quantum computing space.CLAIM REBUTTAL:D-Wave Quantumissued a response to recent claims that newly published classical simulation work has "overturned" D-Wave's demonstration of quantum computational supremacy in quantum simulation. "The claim that D-Wave's achievement has been overturned is inaccurate and not supported by the scientific record," the company said in a statement. It added, "D-Wave welcomes advances in classical algorithms, including recent tensor-network work from researchers at the Flatiron Institute and collaborators. Scientific progress in quantum computing depends on rigorous comparison between quantum and classical methods. However, the recently published work does not reproduce the full scope of D-Wave's peer-reviewed Science result, nor does it solve the hardest problem instances and measurements reported in that work. The only major change in the Flatiron work that has now been published in Science is the addition of large diamond lattice data. This supports the claim that they are using BP-TNS to extract a Kibble-Zurek exponent in a 3D system, but the same criticisms apply as a year ago: they don't compute the same observables, nor all the geometries, nor the largest size geometries, nor all the couplings computed by D-Wave and its collaborators."DOW FUNDING:D-Wave Quantum has been awarded second year funding for the materials for superconducting qubits with scalable fabrication project by the Northeast Regional Defense Technology Hub. Awarded to D-Wave subsidiary Quantum Circuits, the SQFab project is one of four programs selected by the U.S. Department of War through Nordtech, a regional consortium of non-profit accessible semiconductor R&D facilities, government labs, defense companies, academic institutions, and technology manufacturing organizations in and around New York State.GOVERNMENT INVESTMENT:The Trump administration awarded approximately $2B in grants to nine quantum-computing companies, according to the Department of Commerce, or DoC. The government will receive a minority equity stake in each company.Quantinuum, backed by Honeywell, announced a letter of intent, or LOI, with the U.S. Department of Commerce's CHIPS Research and Development Office. The letter of intent proposes that Quantinuum would receive federal funding to enable the development of large-scale, fault-tolerant trapped-ion quantum computers that are of national strategic importance. "Quantum computing has the potential to unlock new possibilities across science, industry, and national priorities for decades to come. This collaboration with the Department of Commerce is designed to help Quantinuum's path to large-scale, fault-tolerant trapped-ion systems while strengthening the U.S. innovation and manufacturing ecosystem," said Rajeeb Hazra, president and CEO of Quantinuum. "The letter of intent supports Quantinuum's plan to partner with the CHIPS R&D Office and onshore suppliers GlobalFoundries, for critical semiconductor components, and Monarch Quantum, for integrated photonics, to further optimize key engineering pathways for components within Quantinuum's future commercial roadmap," the company stated.Xanadu QuantumCEO Christian Weedbrook said on LinkedIn, "Great announcement for the whole of the quantum computing industry today with the US government investment! Xanadu is also excited to be in final negotiations with Canada's federal and provincial governments for up to $390M! More coming soon."Rigetti Computingannounced that it has signed an LOI with the DoC for an award of up to $100M in funding over three years to accelerate superconducting quantum computing R&D. The funding is allocated under the CHIPS Research and Development Office Broad Agency Announcement pursuant to the CHIPS Act to grow U.S. leadership in emerging technologies, including quantum computing. The LOI contemplates that the Department will receive an equity stake in Rigetti consistent with the total amount of the funding. Under the LOI, Rigetti would pursue R&D projects that address major technical challenges in scaling and advancing superconducting quantum computing.IBMand the DoC announced a letter of intent to build an American quantum chip foundry. The CHIPS incentive from the DoC will support the research and development efforts of a new IBM company: Anderon, which will be America's first pure-play quantum foundry. In addition to the $1B in CHIPS incentives provided by the DoC, IBM will contribute $1B of cash into Anderon, along with IBM investing significant intellectual property, assets, and a skilled workforce, with additional investors expected as Anderon grows. Headquartered in Albany, New York as a standalone company, Anderon will operate as a 300-millimeter quantum wafer foundry. Anderon will first support wafer fabrication for superconducting qubit and supporting electronics wafers, with the goal to expand into other quantum modalities.D-Wave Quantum signed a LOI for $100M of proposed funding under the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act. In connection with executing final award documents, D-Wave would issue $100M in shares of its common stock to the U.S. Department of Commerce. This funding would accelerate development and scaling of D-Wave's annealing and gate-model quantum systems, including at its forthcoming R&D facility in Boca Raton, Florida as well as its R&D centers in New Haven, Connecticut and Burnaby, BC, Canada. The funded initiatives would help D-Wave expedite the delivery of advanced superconducting quantum computers, including a 100,000-qubit annealing system and a 10,000-qubit gate-model system.Infleqtionannounced it signed a LOI with the DoC's CHIPS Research and Development Office for $100M in proposed funding contingent on achievement of certain development milestones to accelerate U.S. based quantum computing technologies. The investment will accelerate Infleqtion's development of neutral-atom quantum systems as the United States expands domestic computing capabilities critical to economic competitiveness and national security.GlobalFoundrieslaunched Quantum Technology Solutions, a new quantum business to scale the manufacturing capabilities to achieve utility-scale quantum computing. The effort is anchored by quantum companies already engaged with the company's manufacturing and by the DoC. The DoC and GlobalFoundries have entered into a letter of intent to award the company $375M to accelerate the build-out of Quantum Technology Solutions. In a separate agreement, the Department of Commerce will receive a strategic equity investment in GlobalFoundries, representing approximately 1% ownership.REINVESTING:Sealsqannounced a further strategic investment in EeroQ. Building on the companies' ongoing technology cooperation project, Sealsq has entered into a new investment agreement with EeroQ and has agreed to serve as lead investor in EeroQ's upcoming financing round. This new commitment follows two strategic investments Sealsq made in EeroQ in December 2025 and in February.ANALYST COMMENTARY:B. Riley said that while IonQwas left off the Department of Commerce's letters of intent with nine quantum companies totaling $2.013B, IonQ has a "robust" $3.3B of cash funding and a "very high level of commercial and government engagement," the analyst told investors in a research note. The company's recent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Heterogeneous Architectures for Quantum contract and SkyWater foundry acquisition in progress suggest its federal engagement strategy may favor defense and intelligence channels over CHIPS Act funding, contends Riley. The firm views it as a "distinction, not a slight."Wedbush reiterated an Outperform rating and $225 price target on IBM after the U.S. Department of Commerce announced plans to invest in U.S. quantum computing companies to speed up innovation, including a quantum chip foundry in partnership with IBM. While the timelines for developing quantum computing capabilities remain a long-term focus for IBM and have not changed, the firm believes the U.S. government's funding of quantum computing initiatives will act as a new catalyst to the industry with IBM at the helm. The company will make steady progress across its initiatives while the U.S. administration provides a more stable pathway to advance quantum computing developments, the analyst told investors in a research note.