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From Artemis to Pasqal, a lawyer’s path to quantum

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October 1, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Pasqal has appointed Florence Lao as Chief Legal Officer, bringing nearly two decades of experience guiding international organizations through periods of growth and public company governance. Lao most recently served as General Counsel and Board Secretary of Deezer, and previously participated in an initial public offering on Euronext Paris in 2017 while at SMCP. “Florence is a proven legal leader,” said Pasqal CEO Wasiq Bokhari, “and her expertise across capital markets, governance, compliance and strategic transactions will be invaluable” as the neutral-atom quantum computing firm expands its commercial reach.

Pasqal’s Strategic Hire: Florence Lao as Chief Legal Officer

Before joining Pasqal, she oversaw legal operations for Deezer, an international music streaming service, and previously contributed to SMCP’s 2017 initial public offering on Euronext Paris. Pasqal builds quantum computers from neutral atoms: single atoms held in place by laser light, each one acting as a qubit. The company, founded in 2019 and now employing approximately 275 people, has secured over €440 million in funding and recently completed a business combination with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp, Pasqal says.

She will also support the company’s international operations and continued expansion across key markets. This technology, centered around neutral-atom qubits, is already being deployed on-site at organizations like CEA, CINECA, Aramco and DistriQ, increasing the need for robust legal oversight.

The appointment also arrives as Pasqal refocuses its efforts, shifting away from the LSQUARE defence programme to prioritize civilian quantum support and new public programmes in France. “Pasqal has established itself as a leader in quantum innovation, and I look forward to working alongside the leadership team to support the company’s next phase of growth, strengthen its governance framework and help advance its mission of delivering practical quantum solutions to customers around the world,” said Florence Lao.

Florence is a proven legal leader with extensive experience guiding international organizations through significant periods of growth, transformation and public company governance.

Wasiq Bokhari, CEO of Pasqal
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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