IonQ to buy microsegmentation vendor Elisity for up to $1.3 billion

IonQ, the quantum computing company, said on October 12 that it will buy Elisity, a network security vendor, for stock valued at as much as $1.3 billion. As much as $150 million of that is an earnout that depends on how Elisity's business performs after the deal. IonQ expects to close in the fourth quarter, subject to regulatory approval.

Elisity sells microsegmentation: software that limits which users, devices and workloads on a company network can talk to each other, so an attacker or ransomware that gets in one place can't spread. Companies that buy it now face a new owner whose main business is quantum hardware and quantum-safe encryption. That matters at renewal time, and for anyone halfway through a microsegmentation shortlist.

The terms

IonQ will pay entirely in its own shares. The number of shares is fixed at closing from IonQ's average share price over 20 trading days, with a floor of $33.07 and a cap of $49.61 a share. At Friday's close of $39.89 a share, IonQ was worth close to $16 billion on the stock market, The Quantum Insider reported, citing The Wall Street Journal. The stock was down about 2% before the market opened on Monday.

This is IonQ's second large deal this year. It paid $1.8 billion for chipmaker SkyWater Technology earlier in 2026.

What Elisity sells

Elisity was founded in 2019. Its product, IdentityGraph, builds a picture of every user, device, workload and AI agent on the network and the risk attached to each, and uses that to set least-privilege rules about who can reach what. Security teams can simulate a policy before turning it on. The rules are enforced in software, using the switches and other network gear a company already has.

According to IonQ's announcement, Elisity has more than 100 customer deployments worldwide, including a growing number of Fortune 500 companies, and doubled its revenue and customer count over the past year with no churn among deployed customers. Health care companies and hospitals are among its larger customers, according to The Quantum Insider. Neither company disclosed Elisity's revenue.

James Winebrenner, Elisity's chief executive, will keep running the business after the deal closes.

Why a quantum company wants it

IonQ already sells post-quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution, and says it has built national networks protected against quantum attacks for Switzerland, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Its pitch is that companies will need both: encryption that holds up once quantum computers can break today's algorithms, and tight internal controls on the systems they already run. "Q-Day is coming much faster than predicted," IonQ chief executive Niccolo de Masi said in the announcement.

IonQ said its multiproduct revenue grew 40% year over year in the second quarter. It did not say how Elisity will be sold alongside its existing products, or whether Elisity pricing will change.