Staff Reporter |
News Editor | Wen Shuqi
On August 11, Guoyi Quantum Technology (Hefei) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter “Guoyi Quantum”) officially listed on the STAR Market of the Shanghai Stock Exchange. With an IPO price of 21.22 yuan per share and 40.01 million shares issued, the company raised 849 million yuan. By the closing bell, its share price had skyrocketed by 419.46%, pushing its market value past the 44 billion yuan mark.
This explosive reaction from the capital markets stirs up a familiar story from a decade ago—a group of young PhDs from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) stepping out of their labs, determined to build high-end scientific instruments domestically.
Back in 2016, He Yu was still a doctoral student. His mentor, Du Jiangfeng, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, lent the team a modest 14-square-meter office. The fledgling startup spent their days meeting clients and their nights writing code. From those humble beginnings, the company grew, starting with a domestic Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) spectrometer and expanding into fields like electron microscopy, quantum sensing, and measurement-while-drilling technology.
A decade later, Guoyi Quantum stands as a scientific instruments company with annual revenue exceeding 600 million yuan, serving clients from top universities and research institutes to large manufacturing enterprises, and now it has secured its place on the STAR Market.
Guoyi Quantum’s listing is about more than just “a quantum company going public.” The bigger picture? The long-quiet quantum industry is stepping back into the capital markets’ spotlight.
According to data from the CVSource investment and financing database, the first half of this year saw 47 disclosed financing deals in China’s quantum technology sector, involving 35 companies. Quantum computing alone accounted for 41 of these deals—already surpassing the total for all of 2025. Meanwhile, companies like Origin Quantum, Bose Quantum, and Turing Quantum are all moving forward with their own IPO plans.
From laboratories to industrial parks, and now to the capital markets, quantum technology is undergoing a fresh wave of industrialization acceleration. But this raises a crucial question: Capital is already pricing in the future of quantum, but how far is the industry from true, sustainable commercialization?
Guoyi Quantum Isn’t Just Selling “Quantum”
At its core, Guoyi Quantum’s story is about building high-end scientific instruments in China.
He Yu entered USTC’s prestigious gifted youth class at just 16, completing his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees there under the guidance of Du Jiangfeng. During his PhD, he began working on developing Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) spectrometers.
At the time, high-end scientific instruments were dominated by foreign manufacturers. Du Jiangfeng once recounted a story: after a research team purchased an expensive instrument from an overseas brand, any malfunction meant a potential six-month wait for repairs.
This experience made He Yu realize that scientific instruments aren’t just a minor cog in the research machinery. In his words, “High-end scientific instruments are the weapons in a scientist’s arsenal.”
Founded in 2016, Guoyi Quantum’s early days were tough. The team once dabbled in making classroom clickers for teaching, a project that ultimately failed. It wasn’t until they pivoted back to their core focus on scientific instruments that the company began to find its commercial footing.
According to its prospectus, the company now operates across four main business segments: quantum information technology and spin resonance, electron microscopy, measurement-while-drilling, and gas adsorption analysis.
In 2025, the electron microscopy business generated 373 million yuan in revenue, accounting for 56.29% of the company’s total. The quantum information technology and spin resonance segment brought in 218 million yuan, making up 32.95%.
In other words, today’s Guoyi Quantum isn’t just banking on the “quantum computing” buzzword. Instead, it’s leveraging quantum tech to carve out a niche in the more established scientific instruments market, targeting cutting-edge measurement applications.
This strategy provides the company with a relatively realistic path to commercialization.
To date, Guoyi Quantum’s products have been delivered to over 80 prestigious 985/211 universities and more than 150 research institutes. Its client list also includes major corporations like BOE, BYD, CATL, and Chery Automobile. In 2024, the company commanded a 22% market share in China’s domestic scanning electron microscope market, ranking first among local brands.
However, the company is still not profitable. From 2023 to 2025, its revenue grew from 399.6 million yuan to 666.2 million yuan, but net losses attributable to shareholders were 169 million yuan, 104 million yuan, and 18.878 million yuan respectively. R&D investment remains substantial, totaling 358 million yuan over the three-year period, which is 22.82% of total revenue.
This is a classic hard-tech business: long R&D cycles, lengthy validation periods, slow customer adoption, all while facing formidable market and technological barriers erected by international brands.
Guoyi Quantum acknowledges in its prospectus that it is still in the early stages of industrializing new technologies, expanding its product lines, and ramping up sales.
Its listing is essentially the capital market giving a hard-tech company that’s still scaling up commercialization more time and money. And that mirrors the state of the entire quantum industry right now. The technology is getting closer to industry, but the industry itself hasn’t truly entered a mature commercial cycle.
Why Did a Quantum Industry Chain Grow in Hefei?
Looking at the national landscape, Hefei stands out as the home of a relatively complete quantum industry ecosystem.
As of July this year, Hefei has attracted 107 quantum industry chain companies, with combined revenue exceeding 6 billion yuan. Among them, QuantumCTek focuses on quantum communication, Origin Quantum on quantum computing, Guoyi Quantum on quantum precision measurement, China Telecom Quantum on quantum security, and Yaozheng Quantum on the ion trap approach.
The seed of this industrial ecosystem was planted by USTC.
Research teams led by Pan Jianwei, Guo Guangcan, and Du Jiangfeng have, over the years, built a scientific foundation in Hefei that spans quantum communication, quantum computing, and quantum precision measurement. Over the past decade-plus, a steady stream of research outcomes has migrated from labs to companies, culminating in the industrial cluster we see today.
But a university alone isn’t enough to spawn an industry. What truly sets Hefei apart is its early efforts to bring together research, capital, industrial space, and application scenarios.
A prime example is quantum computing.
Earlier this year, the Hefei Quantum-HPC Integration Computing Center went live. Leveraging the “Chaohu Mingyue” supercomputer, it deployed two 180+ qubit superconducting quantum computers and one 12-qubit ion trap quantum computer, placing quantum computing power on the same public computing platform as classical resources like CPUs and GPUs.
Wang Guyue, director of the Project Management Center at Hefei Big Data Assets Operation Co., Ltd., told our reporters that quantum computing isn’t meant to replace classical supercomputers, but rather to complement them alongside intelligent computing.
“Quantum and classical computing are complementary. For quantum computing to become practical, it needs to develop in tandem with classical computing for now.” The center has already opened its doors to companies like JAC Motors and iFlytek, as well as local universities and research institutes, to explore applications in areas like AI and new materials development.
This is arguably more important than just “building a quantum computer.” The quantum industry’s biggest gap isn’t the machines themselves, but the infrastructure and real-world demand that make those machines useful.
Hefei is also working to lower the cost for companies transitioning from lab to industrialization through industrial funds, open application scenarios, research projects, and industrial parks.
For instance, Yaozheng Quantum received 30 million yuan in startup funding from Hefei’s state-owned capital when it was still just a “PPT-stage” project. It later secured funding from Anhui Province’s science and technology innovation special project, which in turn spurred the participation of upstream and downstream companies in projects involving cryogenic systems and chip manufacturing.
Hefei isn’t the only city betting on quantum. Competition across the country is heating up fast.
Beijing is emphasizing its research resources, supply chain, and quantum-classical computing integration. The Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area has rolled out policies covering multiple quantum computing routes—superconducting, ion trap, neutral atom, and photonic—while also planning for quantum communication, quantum precision measurement, and post-quantum cryptography.
In March, Beijing also established the Quantum-Classical Computing Integration Industry Innovation Center, co-founded by China Telecom Quantum, Bose Quantum, and ZTE, with the goal of promoting the fusion of quantum computing with intelligent computing and high-speed interconnect to build a quantum-classical integration ecosystem.
Shanghai, on the other hand, is doubling down on quantum computing industrialization and future industry agglomeration. In July, Shanghai launched its Quantum Computing Future Industry Cultivation Zone, placing space, research, policy, platforms, scenarios, and companies on a single industrial map to convert its existing research strengths into industrial advantages.
With no single city having yet established itself as the definitive quantum hub, the competition among cities is still very much in the “early sprint” phase.
Capital Is Getting Hot, But the Quantum Industry Isn’t in “Harvest Mode” Yet
The capital markets are clearly starting to believe in the future of quantum. Guoyi Quantum’s listing is just the latest milestone. QuantumCTek had already listed on the STAR Market; Origin Quantum completed a nearly 3 billion yuan Pre-IPO round; and Bose Quantum and Turing Quantum have both entered the IPO tutoring phase.
This is a stark contrast to a few years ago, when quantum computing was long dismissed as a “distant technology.” Now, with steady progress on multiple technical fronts like superconducting, photonic, ion trap, and neutral atom, and new breakthroughs in key areas like quantum error correction, the industry is beginning to view quantum tech as transitioning from a “research problem” to an “engineering problem.”
But capital market enthusiasm doesn’t automatically translate to mature business models.
“There are still two major hurdles to achieving large-scale commercialization,” Zhang Yang, deputy general manager at Yaozheng Quantum, told media including NUPIAO. “First, we need to prove that quantum computing can actually outperform classical computing in practical applications. Second, we need to solve the problem of inaccurate calculation results, which is essentially quantum error correction.”
Currently, Yaozheng Quantum’s customers are still primarily universities and research institutes. The company expects it will take another three to five years before it can gradually move into more market-driven sectors like materials science, drug development, and financial security.
Technical route uncertainty also persists. Superconducting, photonic, ion trap, and neutral atom approaches each have their pros and cons, and no single route has yet been proven as the definitive answer.
Moreover, the quantum computing supply chain is incredibly long. From quantum chips, core components, lasers, cryogenic systems, and control systems, to complete machines, software, cloud services, algorithms, and applications—if any single link lacks mature supply capabilities, it can hold back the entire commercialization process.
This is why companies like Guoyi Quantum deserve individual attention. They didn’t wait for quantum computing to fully mature before finding a business model. Instead, they found revenue in markets with clear and existing demand—like quantum precision measurement and electron microscopy—and are now extending towards more frontier quantum technologies.
Compared to “betting everything on one ultimate technical route,” this might just be a more realistic path to industrialization.
The situation is similar in quantum communication. China Telecom Quantum is pushing forward with the construction of quantum metropolitan area networks. Hefei’s quantum city network has already reached a significant scale, providing quantum-secure access and data transmission encryption services to government and other sectors.
The quantum industry is entering a delicate phase: on one hand, the capital market keeps inflating valuations and expectations; on the other, companies still grapple with long R&D cycles, slow customer validation, and a scarcity of commercial scenarios. These issues all ultimately boil down to the most basic business metric: whether customers are willing to keep paying.
As far as NUPIAO understands, Hefei is currently trying to help companies bridge this gap using public computing power, industrial funds, and application scenarios. Beijing and Shanghai are also building their own industrial ecosystems in different ways. Ultimately, the ones who can turn lab papers into reliable equipment, equipment into orders, and orders into scaled revenue are the ones who will truly survive.
Guoyi Quantum’s listing on the STAR Market today, in a sense, completes the first phase of validation: making the leap from the lab to the industrial field. The next challenge is proving something else—how to evolve from a scientific instruments company that has grown on the back of R&D investment and the domestic substitution dividend into a tech enterprise capable of consistently generating profits.
This, in essence, is the very question facing China’s entire quantum industry. Capital has already arrived ahead of schedule, the industry is still on its way, and the true commercial era for quantum might just be getting started.
