A daily brief, a working primer, a curated cohort directory, and the policy and capital trackers the sector reads before coffee.
The Quantinuum IPO at $20B+ resets every pure-play comp; D-Wave Q1 prints the lumpiest revenue line of the sector against a 1,994% bookings surge.
From the desks · 4 on file
An RFI is not a contract — it is something more durable: a procurement spec that credentials a narrow field. Two vendors. Maybe three. Other roadmaps now lose the federal-procurement narrative that has been supporting their valuations.
Q1 2026 was the strongest collective reporting season the public quantum pure-plays have ever delivered. Every name closed lower. This is not noise. It is the beginning of multiple compression in a cohort whose valuations have been priced for execution that hasn't happened.
Six numbers that matter, four that don't, and where the IPO actually prices. The closest reading we have produced of any S-1 to date.
The cohort · 41 names tracked
Universe
41
Listed + material private
Listed / Private
11 / 30
By ownership status
Listed parent-company cap
$5.7T
IBM, MSFT, GOOGL, HON, IONQ et al.
Ledger Score
58
Cautiously constructive
Parent-company cap is the headline market cap of listed names in the cohort — for IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Honeywell, quantum is a small fraction of that figure. Pure-play public market cap is closer to $40–60B. Private names use last-round post-money as a cap proxy. The Ledger Score above is the sector average across the rated firms.
The Ledger · all rooms
The ten stories we read, ranked. The headline you should have heard about by noon.
Every story in the last 72 hours. Filter by topic and sentiment.
A screener for the listed and material private quantum economy, ranked by Ledger Score.
Five interactive widgets, five working frames. The shortest path to fluency.
The most credible independent benchmark in the field. Live tracker for Stage B and Stage C.
The most consequential listing the sector has seen. Filing, pricing, lockup, comps.
A curated registry of paying-customer quantum workloads, by sector.
NIST standards, vendor readiness, and the sectors most exposed to the refresh cycle.
One, three, five, and ten-year horizons with forecast bands and regime breaks.
The cohort is small, the news cycle is loud, and the numbers won't be honest for another five years. We write one page a day against that asymmetry.
— The Ledger Desk