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Korea Quantum Computing to list on Nasdaq via SPAC deal

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October 7, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Korea Quantum Computing, Inc. will list on the Nasdaq exchange through a business combination agreement with Charlton Aria Acquisition Corporation. The deal values KQC at a pre-money equity value of $80 million, with existing shareholders receiving shares valued at $11.00 each. The combined company expects to use proceeds to commercialize products and expand deployments stemming from customer pilots with companies like POSCO Holdings and Busan Transportation Corporation.

KQC Quantum’s Nasdaq Listing via Business Combination with Charlton Aria

Charlton Aria’s trust account held approximately $93.5 million as of September 25, 2026. The cash available at closing will depend on redemptions by Charlton Aria shareholders. This financial backing is intended to accelerate the commercialization of KQC’s Qubiteer platform and its suite of quantum-safe security products, moving beyond pilot programs to full-scale deployments with industrial and financial clients. The company’s strategy centers on delivering practical quantum solutions, rather than focusing solely on hardware advancements, a distinction highlighted by its work with Korean enterprises.

Founded in Busan in 2021, KQC’s approach prioritizes translating real-world business challenges into solvable models, executing them on the most appropriate computing resource, and integrating the results into existing systems. This focus on application, rather than fundamental processor development, has already yielded projects with POSCO Holdings in battery materials and Busan Transportation Corporation in urban rail scheduling, demonstrating a pathway to tangible value for early adopters.

KQC’s Qubiteer platform, currently in its demo phase since June 2026, employs artificial intelligence to automate the process of model building, solver selection and result presentation, aiming to simplify quantum computing access for businesses, Charlton Aria says. Following the finalization of the first U.S. post-quantum cryptography standards in August 2024, KQC provides both hardware and software solutions to protect enterprise systems during this transition.

Paid proofs of concept with Industrial Bank of Korea and LS ITC demonstrate KQC’s ability to deliver quantum-safe security solutions, and the company is developing QuantumSpan, a platform designed to manage cryptographic asset inventory and migration, according to Charlton Aria. “Today’s agreement is an important step for KQC,” said Ji Hoon Kweon, Chairman of KQC. This strategy is supported by favorable national policies in Korea, which has prioritized quantum science and technology through dedicated legislation.

Beyond its domestic market, KQC is also establishing partner channels in Southeast Asia, beginning with a memorandum of understanding with GEM announced in September 2026. Jung Min Lee, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Charlton Aria, explained the rationale behind the acquisition, stating, “We looked for a company with real customer engagements, products in the market and a clear use for public capital. Proceeds from the transaction will be allocated to product engineering for Qubiteer and QuantumSpan, building customer delivery teams, completing security certifications like KCMVP, and covering public company readiness and working capital.

KQC’s strategy, as outlined in the agreement, is to use the Nasdaq listing to expand its reach and accelerate the adoption of quantum computing and quantum-safe security solutions for businesses in Korea and internationally. “We believe this transaction gives KQC the resources for its next stage of growth,” Lee concluded.

Today’s agreement is an important step for KQC. When we founded the company in 2021, we believed enterprises would adopt quantum technology not because of hardware milestones, but when someone could take a real business problem, connect it to the right computing and security tools, and deliver a result they could use.

Management Commentary
Ji Hoon Kweon, Chairman of KQC

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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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