IonQ, the Maryland quantum computing company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, said on October 12, 2026 that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Elisity, a zero-trust network security company. The transaction is valued at up to $1.3 billion and will be paid entirely in IonQ stock.
The $1.3 billion figure is a ceiling rather than a fixed price. It includes up to $150 million in earnouts that are only paid if the Elisity business meets performance targets, which leaves about $1.15 billion as the amount not tied to future results. The number of IonQ shares issued will be set at closing using the 20-trading-day volume-weighted average price of IonQ stock, but the price used cannot go above $49.61 or below $33.07 per share. IonQ expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to customary conditions and regulatory approval.
Elisity will keep operating under its current leadership after closing, including chief executive James Winebrenner, and will continue to serve its existing customers, according to both companies.
What Elisity built
Elisity sells microsegmentation software: a policy layer that decides which users, devices, workloads and AI agents are allowed to talk to each other on a company network. It enforces those rules through the network a customer already runs rather than through new hardware, so it works regardless of the underlying network technology.
The core of the product is IdentityGraph, which pulls together identity, asset and risk information from Elisity's own discovery and from partner tools. Security teams can simulate a policy before turning it on, then limit each identity to the connections it needs, so that an attacker who gets into one device has fewer places to move.
IonQ said Elisity has more than 100 customer deployments worldwide and a growing number of Fortune 500 customers. It also said Elisity has been doubling revenue and customers year over year with zero churn among deployed customers, figures that neither company broke out further. In its own announcement Elisity listed healthcare networks, manufacturing and industrial companies, life sciences, critical infrastructure and financial services among the sectors it serves. Its 2024 funding release named Main Line Health and Shaw Industries as customers.
“Our customers need to prioritize post-quantum cryptography initiatives while securing existing assets to keep essential operations running.”
Why a quantum computing company wants a network security business
IonQ already sells post-quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution, and says it has deployed quantum-safe national communications networks in Switzerland, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Those products are aimed at the risk that a future quantum computer could break the public-key encryption most networks rely on today, a moment the industry calls Q-Day.
The company presented Elisity as a sales channel as much as a product. Elisity's relationships with chief information security officers give IonQ a way to sell its encryption products and quantum computing services to enterprise and government buyers. The two companies plan to extend IdentityGraph with an inventory of the cryptography each device and system uses, so customers can rank which assets to move to post-quantum encryption first based on business risk.
IonQ chairman and CEO Niccolo de Masi compared the deal to IonQ's purchase of chipmaker SkyWater Technology, which added design and fabrication capacity. IonQ also pointed to White House executive orders on quantum technology and federal migration to post-quantum cryptography as a reason the timing matters. Winebrenner said Elisity's customers need to start post-quantum cryptography work while still securing the systems they run today.
The founders and the funding
IonQ's announcement says Elisity was founded in 2019. The company came out of stealth in August 2020 with a $7.5 million seed round from Atlantic Bridge, with a founding team drawn from Cisco, Qualys and Viptela. In June 2021 it raised a $26 million Series A co-led by Two Bear Capital and AllegisCyber Capital, with Atlantic Bridge taking part.
In April 2024 Elisity announced a $37 million Series B led by Insight Partners, with AllegisCyber Capital and Two Bear Capital returning. The company said at the time that the round brought its total funding to more than $72 million, slightly more than the sum of the three rounds that were announced. The Series B release was datelined San Jose, California, and CyberScoop described Elisity as California-based. Neither company disclosed Elisity's headcount; IonQ said only that it has a global employee footprint.
At the top of the agreed range, a company whose backers put in about $72 million would be sold for IonQ shares worth up to $1.3 billion. The final value to Elisity's shareholders will depend on IonQ's share price at closing and on whether the earnouts are paid.
What happens next
Until the deal closes, the two companies remain separate. After closing, Elisity's platform and IdentityGraph will continue, and Elisity said it will keep serving customers under its current management while it works on joint products with IonQ. Neither company has said whether the Elisity brand will be kept long term or how its staff will be organised inside IonQ.
IonQ describes itself as building a full-stack quantum platform across computing, networking, sensing and security, and Elisity gives it a security business whose revenue does not depend on quantum hardware.
