Quantinuum Helios seeing strong interest, says Honeywell CEO

Quantinuum is seeing strong demand for its new Helios quantum computer and is hitting an inflection point as businesses prepare for real-world use cases, according to Honeywell CEO Vimal Kapur.

Honeywell owns 52% of Quantinuum, which is preparing for an initial public offering this year. 

Kapur, speaking at Citi's Global Industrial Tech & Mobility Conference 2026, said Quantinuum's Helios system solves for fidelity and accuracy. "For every two physical qubits, we can produce 1 logical qubit," said Kapur. "That's a big deal in quantum."

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He added that a year from now Quantinuum will have a system with 100 logical qubits. "If I'm in a business where my business can get impacted, I need to do something about it. I can't sit on the sidelines. And the 2 most impacted -- 2 most interested end markets are banks and pharmaceutical," said Kapur. 

Honeywell's control and stake will go away with the Quantinuum IPO and the hardware platform has been solved. Honeywell's Kapur said 12 to 36 months is the window "because we don't want to keep ownership beyond that."

Kapur said AI is also a big use case for quantum computing and there will be hybrid environments with GPUs and high-performance computing.

As for timelines, Kapur said quantum computing will be useful to business in about three years. 

Kapur said:

"We believe that quantum will have an impact into commercial world more in a 3-year window versus even in a 5-year window because the machine, which is capable of breaking the computational power will be available in approximately 12 months from now.

What is not available is the capability to use the machine. It's a pretty strange situation that you have a road, but you don't have any car. I mean we don't know how to make use of it. So that time, the use case development or economic value creation is a limiting factor. But the interest level from customers is very high."