Quantum Firm IonQ Buys Zero-Trust Security Company Elisity in Deal Worth Up to US$1.3 Billion

IonQ, a Maryland-based quantum computing company, announced on Monday that it will acquire Elisity, a California-based zero-trust network security firm. The all-stock deal is valued at up to US$1.3 billion. Elisity, founded in 2019, sells a software policy layer that controls which users, devices, workloads and AI agents can communicate across a network, regardless of the underlying network technology. The company reports more than 100 global deployments, says its revenue and customer counts have doubled year over year, and says no deployed customers have left.

IonQ has been building a security arm focused on post-quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution. These technologies are intended to replace or supplement encryption that future quantum computers may be able to break. The companies describe the combined offering as tackling a two-front problem: conventional attacks that move at machine speed, and the risk that encrypted data is stored now and decrypted later once quantum computing makes that practical. IonQ CEO Niccolo de Masi said "Q-Day is coming much faster than predicted".

Governments and industry have been speeding up their plans for post-quantum encryption. The Trump administration recently issued an executive order that moves the federal migration target from 2035 to 2030, while Google and other companies have set their own timelines at 2029. Some US quantum executives also believe Chinese labs have made breakthroughs in several areas of quantum computing.