Singapore-based quantum software startup Horizon Quantum Computing has completed its merger with dMY Squared, securing a Nasdaq listing and roughly US$120 million in gross proceeds.
The deal gives the company a far bigger war chest than it had as a private startup and offers an early test of whether investors are ready to back deep-tech SPAC stories again.
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Horizon Quantum Computing began trading on Nasdaq on March 20 under the ticker HQ after closing its business combination with dMY Squared Technology Group, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.
For Horizon, the attraction of a SPAC was fairly straightforward: speed, price certainty and access to US public-market investors without the longer, more fragile runway of a traditional IPO. That matters even more for a company like Horizon, which is building software infrastructure for quantum computing — a field long on promise, short on near-term revenues, and still difficult for mainstream investors to value using conventional yardsticks.
The Singapore-founded startup said the transaction delivered about US$120 million in gross proceeds before expenses. That is a meaningful jump from the roughly US$21 million in publicly disclosed private funding Horizon had raised since its founding in 2018, making the de-SPAC by far its biggest capital event to date.
The company plans to use the cash to expand research and development, build out its hardware testbed, and advance its quantum programming platform, Triple Alpha.
Chief executive and founder Joe Fitzsimons framed the listing as a bet that quantum computing would reach a turning point. “The field is reaching an inflection point,” he said, pointing to recent progress in quantum hardware and error correction.
That is the optimistic view. The harder question is whether public investors will buy into it.
Quantum computing has attracted increasing attention as companies race to turn laboratory advances into usable systems, but commercial timelines remain hazy. Horizon’s pitch is that it does not need to bet on one winning hardware architecture. Instead, it is building hardware-agnostic software tools that could sit above whichever quantum machines eventually scale.
That positioning also helps explain why a SPAC made sense. Unlike a conventional IPO, the SPAC route has historically given emerging technology companies more room to tell a forward-looking story, particularly when current revenues do not yet capture the scale of the opportunity they are chasing.
Still, Horizon Quantum’s deal should not be read as proof that the SPAC market is suddenly back in full force after its long slump. The frenzy of 2020 and 2021 ended badly for many companies, with poor post-listing performance, tighter regulation and rising interest rates draining enthusiasm from the structure. What has emerged since is not a broad revival, but a more selective market in which investors are willing to revisit deals with clearer strategic logic.
In that sense, Horizon Quantum looks less like a sign of another SPAC gold rush and more like a targeted exception: a deep-tech company with a specialised narrative, a US listing ambition and a need for substantial capital.
The transaction also adds Horizon to a still short list of Singapore-headquartered companies that have reached public markets through SPAC mergers. Publicly known examples include Grab, PropertyGuru, Bitdeer, and ESGL; with Horizon, the number is at least five.
That count is notable because Singapore has produced relatively few de-SPAC listings compared with the wave seen in the US, even as the city-state has become an increasingly important base for regional technology and deep-tech startups. Grab and PropertyGuru were consumer internet names. Bitdeer was tied to digital assets. Horizon now brings quantum software into that small club — a very different bet, and arguably a riskier one.
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The broader implication is that Southeast Asian startups are still willing to use alternative paths to the public market when a standard IPO does not quite fit. Whether that becomes more common again will depend less on nostalgia for the SPAC boom than on whether newly listed companies can show discipline after the bell rings.
For Horizon, the immediate milestone is clear enough: it now has Nasdaq access, fresh capital, and public-market scrutiny. The harder part begins now — proving that quantum software infrastructure can become a serious business before investor patience collapses into the nearest probability wave.
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