IQM Brand Guidelines: An Aalto and VTT Spin-Off Making Superconducting Quantum Computers

From a university lab to a national machine.

IQM is a Finnish maker of superconducting quantum computers, based in Espoo. Its full name is IQM Quantum Computers, and Finnish Wikipedia describes it as a listed company, IQM Quantum Computers Oyj. It began in 2018 as a spin-off from research at Aalto University and the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, according to Finnish Wikipedia; the Finnish public broadcaster Yle reported in August 2025 that the company was founded that year as a joint project of VTT and Aalto.

Finnish Wikipedia names four founders: Aalto professor Mikko Möttönen; Jan Goetz and Kuan Yen Tan, who had worked in his research group; and Juha Vartiainen, who came from outside the group with a background in quantum computing research. Yle describes Goetz as chief executive and one of the founders.

Its early growth was tied to a national programme. Finnish Wikipedia says the Finnish state chose IQM in 2020 as VTT’s partner to build computers of 5, 20 and 50 qubits. The first, of five qubits, was completed late in 2021 and installed at Micronova, the national micro- and nanotechnology centre run by VTT and Aalto in Otaniemi; Yle reported in February 2026 that IQM and VTT had together completed Finland’s first quantum computer in 2021. A 20-qubit machine followed in 2023 and was extended to 50 qubits early in 2025, according to Finnish Wikipedia, which adds that by 2025 IQM had installed systems on the same pattern in Germany, Spain and the Czech Republic.

The company has grown abroad since. Finnish Wikipedia says it has expanded to Germany, France, the United States and Singapore, and runs quantum computing centres in Espoo and Munich whose machines can be used over the cloud. In August 2025 Yle reported IQM’s announcement that it would build a Radiance system for Oak Ridge National Laboratory, part of the US Department of Energy, to be integrated with the laboratory’s supercomputers.

Made in Espoo, listed twice.

IQM became a public company in July 2026. Yle reported in February 2026 that it would list in the United States by merging with a company that was already listed, and that it planned to list in Helsinki afterwards; Jan Goetz told Yle then that IQM would remain a Finnish company. Finnish Wikipedia names the merger partner as the special purpose acquisition company Real Asset Acquisition Corp, and says IQM’s depositary shares began trading on Nasdaq on 2 July 2026. Yle, carrying a report from the news agency STT, said trading on the Helsinki exchange began on 3 July 2026 under the code IQMX, a day after US trading opened, and called it the first time a company had listed in parallel in Helsinki and on a US exchange.

Manufacturing stays in Finland. Yle wrote in August 2025 that IQM makes the cores of its superconducting computers in Espoo, and Finnish Wikipedia says the company builds its machines in Espoo production facilities with the clean rooms needed to make quantum circuits. In February 2026 Yle reported that the company was investing further in its Espoo factory. Superconducting qubits are circuits built around Josephson junctions and cooled close to absolute zero, Finnish Wikipedia explains, and it links IQM’s choice of the technology to the legacy of Aalto University’s Low Temperature Laboratory.

IQM’s website names four products. IQM Spark is a five-qubit system it describes as tailored for universities and research; IQM Radiance is offered, it says, with 20, 54 and 150 qubits and is aimed at high-performance computing centres; IQM Halocene is designed for work on quantum error correction; and IQM Resonance is its cloud platform. Yle reported in July 2026 that the first Halocene system was due by the end of that year and that IQM aims for fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2030. The same report said IQM states it has sold 23 quantum computers, more than any other company, and that it employs more than 400 people.

Quantum computing, by modality.

Quantum computing companies sell machines that few customers will ever see, so their pictures carry much of the explaining. The most familiar image is the dilution refrigerator: a tiered, gold-coloured structure of plates and cables that looks a little like a chandelier when its outer casings are removed. Rigetti’s website, for one, walks visitors through such a refrigerator, naming the gold-plated copper plates that separate its temperature stages.

Each hardware approach has its own pictures. Companies that trap ions or neutral atoms tend to show vacuum chambers, laser tables and optical benches, often lit so that the beams and windows glow; makers of superconducting and silicon devices show chip close-ups and wafers, frequently under blue or violet light. Photonic companies show the optical chips and fibres that carry their qubits. Alongside the hardware come people: physicists and engineers at racks of control electronics, oscilloscopes and laptops.

Because qubits themselves cannot be photographed in any ordinary sense, the sector also leans on abstraction. Renderings of glowing spheres, lattices, interference patterns and waves stand in for superposition and entanglement, and dark backgrounds with points of coloured light are common across websites, investor presentations and conference stands.

Those conferences are part of the visual record too. IEEE Quantum Week, whose 2026 edition its organisers set in Toronto, gathers researchers and engineers around technical papers and workshops, while Q2B, which lists 2026 meetings in Tokyo, Copenhagen and Chicago, presents itself as a place to connect quantum technology with business. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it and where its machines are built — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Three capitals, one line.

IQM presents itself in three capital letters, with “Quantum Computers” as the descriptor in its full name. Its website, at iqm.tech, opens with the line “Quantum Computers. Delivered.” Older addresses at meetiqm.com now forward there. Readers searching online should note that iqm.com belongs to an unrelated programmatic advertising company.

Its four product names — Spark, Radiance, Halocene and Resonance — are each set after the company name, as in IQM Spark. Much of its early record runs through public partners: its first machines were built with VTT under a state programme, and Finnish Wikipedia says the customers for its systems up to 2025 were public-sector bodies, because its current machines are intended mainly for teaching and research. Yle reported in July 2026 that IQM has supplied systems to companies, research institutes, universities, high-performance computing centres and national laboratories.

For a design guide, IQM shows how a university spin-off can keep a plain three-letter name while its product line does the descriptive work. Compare Rigetti, another builder of superconducting quantum computers, and Pasqal, a European quantum computer maker working with neutral atoms. For this guide we use a deep fjord blue and a frost white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep IQM’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.