The core message of Olivier Tonneau’s talk was that quantum is no longer mainly a question of whether it will happen, but when it will become useful at industrial scale. The session opened with the familiar skepticism that quantum has repeatedly been described as “five years away,” followed by recent market signals: an IPO of Quantonium valued at roughly $13 billion to $14 billion USD and PASCAL going public on Nasdaq at about $2 billion. Tonneau introduced himself as partner and cofounder at Quantonation, an early-stage venture fund dedicated to quantum technologies that began in 2018 and has invested in more than 45 companies worldwide.

Tonneau argued that qubit count is not the decisive metric anymore. While publications often highlight 50, 120, or 1,000 qubits, he said the more important questions are deployment, usefulness, and capital formation. On deployment, he said hardware is already out of the lab: around 120 quantum computers are deployed worldwide, including machines in data centers that users can access through the cloud. Europe has many deployments because the European Commission pushed public procurement, but he cautioned that deployment counts include both machines with several hundred qubits nearing everyday adoption and smaller four-to-ten-qubit systems that are more useful for discovery than industrial applications.

He described a market of about $2 billion, citing a McKinsey study, growing at around 50% annually. Quantonation’s more mature 2021-vintage portfolio companies are, on average, doubling in size each year, which he framed as evidence that contenders are generating revenue in the tens of millions and potentially moving toward hundreds of millions. On hardware choices, he said it remains impossible to pick a winning modality among trapped ions, superconducting, photonics, and other approaches. He pointed to NVIDIA’s collaborations with around 20 quantum companies across qubit types as evidence that several machine types may coexist before any single technology is established as superior.

On adoption and capital, Tonneau said roughly 300 Fortune 500 companies now have structured quantum discovery programs, with some spending more than $10 million and a smaller fraction, mainly banks, spending more than $50 million. Startup funding accelerated from about $2 billion in recent years to $12 billion last year, with around $8 billion in the U.S. and about $4 billion across the EU, UK, and Canada, while China remains unclear. His timeline was cautious: hundreds of more robust machines with near-100% runtime may take three to five years to build out, and mainstream utility is probably after 2030. The final test is whether quantum solves clients’ hardest computing problems and whether someone is ready to pay for it.