Xanadu Quantum Technologies has announced plans to go public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger that will see the company valued at $3.1 billion.

Under the terms of the deal, quantum computing firm Xanadu will merge with Crane Harbor Acquisition Corp., a publicly traded SPAC, to form a new entity.

A traditional SPAC merger sees investors create a SPAC, raise money through an initial public offering, and then use it to acquire the startup. In those cases, the two companies then merge under the startup's name. The move gives startups a fast-track route to going public.

The combined company is expected to receive approximately $225 million from Crane Harbor’s trust account, in addition to $275 million from investors via a common equity committed private placement investment (PIPE) to purchase shares of the new entity at $10.00 per share.

In a statement, Xanadu said more than 90 percent of the capital committed in the PIPE financing was sourced from new investors. The net proceeds from the deal will be used to support the development, deployment, and commercialization of Xanadu's photonic quantum computer systems, including its open-source software, PennyLane.

Upon closure of the deal, Xanadu said it is expected to become the first publicly traded pure play photonic quantum computing company, and plans to list on the Toronto Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.

Toronto-based Xanadu, founded in 2016, raised C$40 million (US$27m) from the Canadian government’s Strategic Innovation Fund to build and commercialize photonic-based, fault-tolerant quantum computers in January 2023.

Prior to that, the company closed a US$100 million Series C funding round in November 2022.

In February 2025, the company announced it had built a prototype of the world’s first universal photonic quantum computer.

Dubbed Aurora, the 12-qubit machine is the successor to the company’s previous quantum computers, X8 and Borealis. It consists of four photonically interconnected modular and independent server racks, containing 35 photonic chips and 13km of fiber optics. The system operates at room temperature and is fully automated, which Xanadu says makes it capable of running “for hours without any human intervention.”

“When Xanadu was founded in 2016, the mission was, and still is, simple: to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere,” Xanadu COO, Rafal Janik, wrote on LinkedIn. “At Xanadu, we believe quantum computing is the next technological leap beyond AI, with the power to transform medicine, finance, materials science, and more. And we’re confident that photonics is the most scalable, energy-efficient path to get there.”

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC is serving as lead financial advisor to Xanadu, with Cohen & Company Capital Markets, a division of Cohen & Company Securities, LLC, also acting as a financial advisor and capital markets. JonesTrading is serving as the capital markets advisor to Crane Harbor.