IonQ to Buy Elisity in Up to $1.3 Billion Stock Deal
The quantum platform company said the all-stock combination will pair post-quantum cryptography with Zero Trust policy enforcement for enterprise and government customers.
IonQ (IONQ) agreed to acquire Elisity, Inc. in an all-stock transaction valued at up to $1.3 billion, a combination the quantum platform company said will pair its post-quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution capabilities with Elisity’s Zero Trust technology platform.
The companies expect the deal to close in the fourth quarter of 2026. IonQ said the pairing is intended to help enterprise and government customers address current cyber threats and prepare for the quantum era.
Chairman and CEO Niccolo de Masi framed the purchase as a continuation of the build-out strategy IonQ used when it added SkyWater Technology, which expanded the company’s capabilities in chip design, fabrication, and packaging. He said Elisity will bring proven enterprise policy enforcement scale and deployment experience to IonQ’s quantum security strategy and will give the company a strong growth platform to serve customers and create value for shareholders.
The move sits alongside a string of acquisitions IonQ has used to assemble a full-stack quantum platform spanning computing, networking, sensing, and security. In January 2026, the company agreed to buy SkyWater Technology, the largest exclusively U.S.-based semiconductor foundry, in a cash-and-stock deal implying about $1.8 billion of equity value, a transaction it said would accelerate its fault-tolerant computing roadmap and secure a domestic supply chain. IonQ completed that acquisition after receiving final regulatory approval in July 2026, with SkyWater continuing as a U.S.-based foundry under the IonQ umbrella.
The same period saw IonQ close Skyloom Global Corp., a U.S. developer of lightwave-optics technology for secure communications, adding free-space optical and photonic systems work to its quantum networking and quantum key distribution roadmap. Earlier in 2026, it also agreed to acquire Seed Innovations, a Colorado software and R&D firm, to fold machine learning and cloud architecture expertise into its Quantum Infrastructure team.
Those deals have been layered on top of Oxford Ionics, which IonQ completed in September 2025 in a $1.075 billion mix of stock and cash, and Capella Space, whose satellite infrastructure the company said would underpin a space-based quantum key distribution network. Elisity’s Zero Trust platform is the next piece of that security stack, aimed at policy enforcement at enterprise scale rather than at chip fabrication or optical hardware.
IonQ said the Elisity combination is meant to give it a growth platform for quantum security customers already buying post-quantum cryptography and QKD, with the Zero Trust layer covering current cyber threats as well as the quantum-era threat model. The all-stock structure and the expected fourth-quarter 2026 close leave the transaction still subject to customary closing conditions.