Quantinuum, the quantum-computing company majority-owned by Honeywell, is targeting a valuation of $12.7bn in its US IPO, according to a Reuters report on Tuesday, a level materially below the $20bn-plus figure that circulated earlier in May when the company filed its S-1.

The new figure puts the IPO at roughly 27% above the $10bn pre-money valuation set in Honeywell’s $600m equity raise last September. It is also about 36% below the earlier IPO whisper, suggesting either that bankers have taken a more conservative read of public-market appetite for pre-revenue quantum names or that the company itself has chosen to price for a confident debut rather than a stretch one.

Quantinuum reported $31m in revenue in 2025, against operating losses that the S-1 implied are larger by an order of magnitude. The IPO would be the largest quantum-computing listing to date and the first in which a private quantum company moves directly from frontier hardware development to a public-market valuation north of $10bn.

Comparable public peers, including IonQ, Rigetti and D-Wave, trade well below that mark on revenues of similar or smaller scale. Quantinuum’s premium rests on its hardware approach, trapped-ion qubits, which is generally considered to have a longer error-correction runway than the superconducting approach used by most quantum-adjacent listed firms.

Honeywell’s majority position means the IPO doubles as a portfolio-management exercise. The industrial conglomerate has spent the past two years preparing investors for the eventual separation of its quantum business; the listing creates a tradable security for the position and gives Honeywell shareholders explicit quantum exposure rather than an embedded one. The company has not signalled how much of its stake it intends to retain after the offering.

The lower $12.7bn target lands inside an unusually busy quantum-funding cycle. Nord Quantique reached a $1.4bn valuation in a Fidelity-backed round earlier this month; Finland’s IQM has been on a sustained capital-raising run; the European quantum venture fund 55 North closed its first €134m in October.

None of these are yet at the scale Quantinuum is now seeking, which is why the IPO will function partly as a benchmark for what public markets are actually willing to pay for the category.

The discount from $20bn to $12.7bn is the salient editorial point. Pre-revenue or pre-meaningful-revenue companies pitching frontier physics have, on the recent evidence of CoreWeave and similar AI-adjacent IPOs, found public investors more disciplined than late-stage private rounds had assumed.

A $12.7bn target is high relative to Quantinuum’s 2025 revenue but disciplined relative to the private-market mark; it suggests the underwriters have looked at the order book and reset expectations accordingly. Reuters did not publish the names of the lead bookrunners.

The roadshow is expected to begin within weeks; Quantinuum is listed under the ticker QNT on Nasdaq when the offering prices.