British-Pakistani entrepreneur Ilyas Khan has become a billionaire after Quantinuum’s blockbuster listing on NASDAQ.
The company raised $1.68 billion in its initial public offering last week, in what is being described as the biggest IPO so far by a quantum startup.
After selling 28 million shares at $60 each on June 3, Quantinuum was valued at more than $15.6 billion. Its shares later opened at $58, while Khan’s roughly 15 percent stake pushed his net worth to around $2.2 billion.
Khan is the founder and former chief executive of Cambridge Quantum, the company that later merged with Honeywell’s quantum division to form Quantinuum.
Unlike conventional computers that run on silicon-based chips, Quantinuum’s systems use trapped ions controlled by lasers to perform calculations.
Another prominent Pakistani-origin name in the field is Dr. Irfan Siddiqi, a Pakistani-American physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. He has described quantum computing as a system built around entanglement, where quantum bits are linked in ways that allow them to exist in exponentially larger numbers of states than classical bits. That ability is central to the promise of quantum machines.
A recent study found that 10 Pakistani immigrants are among the founders or co-founders of billion-dollar startups in the United States, placing Pakistan alongside far larger and more established immigrant founder networks.
