IonQ announced Monday that it will acquire Elisity, a zero-trust network security firm, in an all-stock transaction valued at up to $1.3 billion that folds enterprise access control into the quantum computing company’s expanding cybersecurity business.
Elisity, founded in 2019, sells a software policy layer that governs which users, devices, workloads and AI agents can communicate across a network, independent of the underlying network technology. The California-based company reports more than 100 global deployments and says revenue and customer counts have doubled year over year, with no churn among deployed customers.
Maryland-based IonQ, whose core business is quantum computing, has been building a security arm around post-quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution, technologies intended to replace or supplement encryption that future quantum computers may be able to break.
The combination addresses what the companies describe as a two-front problem: conventional attacks that operate at machine speed, and the risk that encrypted data could be retained until quantum decryption becomes practical, a concept known as “harvest now, decrypt later.”
“Our customers need to contain attacks today, put AI to work safely, and prepare for quantum risk,” Elisity CEO James Winebrenner wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.
IonQ Chairman and CEO Niccolo de Masi struck a more urgent note in a release announcing the deal: “Q-Day is coming much faster than predicted,” he said, referencing the point at which quantum computers could break current encryption technology.
Both governments and the technology industry have accelerated their timelines to adopt post-quantum cryptography over the past few years. This is partly due to a belief among executives in the U.S. quantum sector that Chinese scientists and labs have achieved breakthroughs across several different fields of quantum computing over the past two years.
The Trump administration recently issued an executive order directing federal agencies to boost the domestic quantum industry and move up internal timelines for migrating to PQC encryption from 2035 to 2030. Google, a potential industry bellwether, and other companies have opted to move their own migration timelines to 2029.
Winebrenner told CyberScoop those deadlines are easier to set than to meet. Enterprises will hace to start with identifying the information and operations that need protecting, then mapping the identities, communications and cryptographic dependencies that support them.
“You won’t replace every legacy system at once,” he said. The approach is to migrate what can be migrated, test interoperability and operational impact, and tightly control access around systems that need more time. Segmentation helps contain threats, he added, but does not replace the cryptographic upgrades.
Elisity’s planned role in that transition is to connect identity data to cryptographic decision-making. Its roadmap would extend its IdentityGraph product with cryptographic inventory and risk information, allowing customers to rank post-quantum upgrades by business risk.
The deal also reflects how AI agents are reshaping network security. Elisity’s platform already treats AI agents and other non-human identities as subjects of access policy, and the company has joined the Open Secure AI Alliance with priorities that include least-privilege rules for sanctioned agents, containment of agentic threats and control of unsanctioned AI.
Winebrenner identified the hardest unresolved problem in agent control as maintaining trustworthy identity and authorization as an agent’s task, tools and delegated permissions change. “Knowing an agent is approved is only the beginning,” he said. “You need to understand whose authority it is exercising, what it needs to reach right now and when that access should end.” His prescription is least privilege down to the task: “An AI agent should have access only to the resources its task requires, including when it interacts with older infrastructure.”
The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.
UPDATE: 10/12/2026, 4:25 p.m.: This story has been updated with comments from Elisity CEO James Winebrenner.
