Saturday, May 23, 2026

Rigetti: The $7 Million Company With an $8 Billion Story

This is the story of Rigetti, built from Rigetti’s own filings and investor materials. It is a first pass told largely from the company’s own side of the record, where every story wears its best clothes, so the bull case gets a full and sympathetic hearing here, even as I flag the places where it strains. In future notes, I will challenge this version of the story, dig deeper into the science underneath it, and revise the thesis where the facts demand it. This is not a valuationEstimating what a company is actually worth, typically from its projected future cash flows., and it is not financial advice. The story, as I tell it here, is my own opinion. Do your own research, and decide for yourself whether you agree with me.

I have been reading Rigetti Computing’s filings, and the first thing that strikes me is the size of the gap between what the company sells and what the market is paying for it. In the year ended December 31, 2025, Rigetti booked revenueThe total money a company brings in from sales, before any costs are subtracted. of $7.1 million. Not billion. Million. That figure was down 34 percent from the year before.¹ Against that, the company carried a stock-market value of roughly $8.6 billion in late May 2026.² You can read those two numbers a dozen times and they will not reconcile, because they are not supposed to. One is a measure of a business. The other is a measure of a story. The whole of Rigetti lives in the distance between them, and that is exactly what makes it worth telling.

So let me tell it properly: where this company came from, who is steering it, why it might win, and what would have to be true for the story to fall apart.

A physicist’s bet, and the fab in the basement

Rigetti was founded in 2013 by Chad Rigetti, a physicist who had worked in IBM’s quantum group, on a bet that was contrarian in two directions at once. The first bet was on a modalityThe underlying physical approach a quantum computer is built on (trapped ions, superconducting circuits, photonics, etc.). Choosing a quantum stock is partly a bet on which modality wins.: superconducting qubitsA qubit made from tiny electrical circuits chilled to near absolute zero, where they lose all electrical resistance., tiny circuits chilled to near absolute zeroThe coldest temperature physically possible (about -273.15 Celsius), where atomic motion almost stops., which Rigetti argued were the most mature path to a real quantum computer because they switch fast (gate speedsHow long one operation takes. Superconducting gates (nanoseconds) are roughly 1,000 times faster than ion or atom gates (microseconds). of 50 to 70 nanoseconds, roughly a thousand times faster than the trapped-ion and neutral-atom approaches rivals were chasing) and because they could ride on the back of existing semiconductor manufacturing.¹

The second bet was the one that still defines the company. Rigetti decided to build its own chip foundryA factory that manufactures chips. Owning one lets a company iterate its own hardware faster than outsourcing.. In 2016 it commissioned Fab-1, which it describes as the industry’s first dedicated quantum integrated-circuit fabrication facility. Most of its competitors design chips and farm out the making of them. Rigetti chose to own the means of production, on the theory that quantum chips are so new, and the design-to-test learning loop so tight, that whoever controls fabrication controls the pace of improvement. In the company’s own words, the synchronized “design to fabrication to test flywheel” is what lets it iterate. Vertical integrationOwning several steps of your own supply chain, for example from chip design through to the cloud service., from chip through cloud, is the spine of the entire strategy.¹

For a long time this was a science project that happened to have a tickerThe short symbol that identifies a stock on an exchange, such as IONQ or QBTS.. Rigetti went public through a SPACA shell company that raises money through an IPO, then merges with a real business to take it public quickly. in 2022, near the top of that particular mania, and then nearly died.¹ By early 2023 the stock was trading around a dollar and Rigetti had a delistingBeing removed from a stock exchange, often for trading too low or breaking listing rules. notice from the Nasdaq.³ The notices came back in late 2024, and shareholders went so far as to authorize a one-for-ten reverse splitCombining shares (for example 10 old shares into 1 new one) to lift the per-share price, often to avoid delisting. to stay listed, a maneuver the company never had to execute because the price eventually recovered on its own.⁴ This is the genuine ordeal in the story, and it matters, because a company that has stared at delisting tends to treat a full balance sheet very differently from one that has never been hungry.

The fab man takes the wheel

Here is the narrative hinge I find most interesting, and it is a management story.

Chad Rigetti, the founder whose name is still on the door, left the company in December 2022, right as the public-market reckoning began. The board did not replace him with another quantum physicist. It hired Dr. Subodh Kulkarni, a thirty-year semiconductor-industry operator who had run CyberOptics, a maker of high-precision sensors and inspection systems for chip manufacturing, until its sale to Nordson in 2022. Kulkarni holds a PhD in chemical engineering from MIT and spent earlier years in research management at 3M and IBM.⁵

Think about the fit. Rigetti’s entire competitive claim rests on a fab, on yield, on manufacturing a notoriously finicky chip at rising scale. The board, facing a phase that was about industrialization rather than invention, went out and hired a manufacturing-and-commercialization executive to run a company whose moatA durable advantage that protects a company from competitors, like the moat around a castle. is supposed to be manufacturing. There is a well-worn idea in company life cycles that the visionary founder who is perfect for the start-up is often the wrong person for the scaling phase, and vice versa. Rigetti is a clean example: the physicist created the science, then handed off to the industrialist for the part where you have to make the thing, sell the thing, and not run out of money doing it. Kulkarni is an “experience” leader, not a charismatic one, and that is the right kind of leader for this chapter.

What the machines actually do now

Under Kulkarni the company narrowed its focus to superconducting and put its head down on a two-variable problem: more qubitsThe basic unit of a quantum computer. Like a 'bit' in a normal computer, but instead of being only 0 or 1 it can be 0, 1, or a blend of both at once., and fewer errors. The roadmap reads like a staircase.

The chipletBuilding a large processor by tiling together many small, high-quality chips instead of making one giant chip whose yield collapses. idea is the heart of the technical story, and it is worth saying plainly. Rather than try to build one enormous, perfect quantum chip (yields collapseThe instant a measurement forces a qubit from a blend of possibilities into one definite classical value. as a single die grows), Rigetti makes small, high-quality 9-qubit chiplets and tiles them together, the same modular insight that reshaped classical processors. The company holds the distinction of having built the industry’s first multi-chip quantum processor,¹ and it argues this is the only credible road to the 1,000-and-then-million-qubit machines that real fault toleranceThe milestone where a quantum computer can run long calculations correctly despite ongoing errors. It is the field's holy grail. will demand. On a prototype it has already shown 99.9 percent two-qubit fidelityThe accuracy of an operation acting on two qubits at once. It is the harder and more meaningful test of a machine's quality than a single-qubit gate. at a blistering 28 nanoseconds using a new gate scheme.⁶ So the pieces of the thesis exist in the lab. The question is whether they arrive together at scale.

Why this company might win

Strip away the marketing and the bull case for Rigetti reduces to a single sentence: superconducting qubitsA qubit made from tiny electrical circuits chilled to near absolute zero, where they lose all electrical resistance. are the leading modalityThe underlying physical approach a quantum computer is built on (trapped ions, superconducting circuits, photonics, etc.). Choosing a quantum stock is partly a bet on which modality wins., modular chipletsBuilding a large processor by tiling together many small, high-quality chips instead of making one giant chip whose yield collapses. are the only way to scale them, and owning the fab is the only way to iterate chiplets fast enough to win. Every pillar of the strategy hangs off that sentence.

The modality claim has real evidence behind it. On Rigetti’s own comparison, superconducting systems lead on qubit countThe raw number of physical qubits in a machine. A weak measure of power on its own, since quality and connectivity matter more. and gate speedHow long one operation takes. Superconducting gates (nanoseconds) are roughly 1,000 times faster than ion or atom gates (microseconds)., the two axes where the company is strongest.

Source: Rigetti May 2026 investor deck.⁶ Gate-speed units are nanoseconds for superconducting versus microseconds for ions and atoms, a roughly thousand-fold difference.

Notice the honest tension already sitting in that table. Rigetti leads on speed and scale, but the trapped-ion players lead on fidelity, the very dimension where Rigetti most needs to improve. Speed is Rigetti’s gift; accuracy is its homework.

The vertical-integration claim is where I think the most durable advantage lies, if there is one. Rigetti says its control electronics deliver price-performance of roughly $10,000 per qubitThe basic unit of a quantum computer. Like a 'bit' in a normal computer, but instead of being only 0 or 1 it can be 0, 1, or a blend of both at once. against an industry figure nearer $35,000, and that Fab-1 lets it compress its innovation cycles.⁶ A captive foundryA factory that manufactures chips. Owning one lets a company iterate its own hardware faster than outsourcing. is expensive and unglamorous, and it is precisely the kind of asset that is hard for a software-minded competitor to replicate quickly. The company backs this with a portfolio of roughly 285 issued and pending patents (about 120 granted) and 19 deployed systems.¹ If you believe quantum computing is, at bottom, a manufacturing problem, then Rigetti is built around the right belief, and it hired the right CEO to act on it.

And the customers, while small in dollars, are the right kind of validating names: Amazon Web Services, Standard Chartered, and Moody’s on the commercial side; DARPAThe U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funds high-risk, frontier research., the Department of Energy, Fermilab, and the Air Force Research Laboratory on the US government side; India’s C-DAC, which placed an $8.4 million order for a 108-qubit system to be installed in Bengaluru in the second half of 2026.¹ These are not revenueThe total money a company brings in from sales, before any costs are subtracted. engines yet. They are credibility, and in a pre-revenue field credibility is the product.

The capital story, which is the real story

Now we get to the part that explains the $8 billion. Rigetti does not fund itself with profits, because it has none. It funds itself by selling stock into its own narrative, and it has done so brilliantly. In 2025 it raised $350 million through an at-the-market equity program at an average of $11.55 a share,¹ took $35 million from a strategic investment by Taiwan’s Quanta Computer (priced at $11.59, alongside a $250 million five-year co-investment commitment),⁸ and pulled in another $50 million as warrant holders exercised. The result, at March 31, 2026, was $569 million of cash and investmentsA company's readily available money plus investments it can sell quickly. and zero debt.⁸

Set that war chest against the burn. Rigetti used about $58.5 million of cash in operations across all of 2025.¹ Even allowing for rising capital spending on Fab-1 and additional dilution refrigeratorsA specialized fridge that cools quantum chips to a hair above absolute zero., the balance sheet buys the better part of a decade. For a company whose entire proposition is “give us time to reach quantum advantageA quantum computer solving a genuinely useful problem faster, cheaper, or better than the best classical computer. in about three years,” time is the one thing it has bought itself in abundance. The near-death experience of 2023 has been answered with a fortress.

Here is the flywheel, stated cleanly: a compelling narrative lifts the stock; a high stock lets Rigetti sell shares cheaply (in dilutionWhen a company issues new shares, shrinking each existing shareholder's slice of the company. terms); the cash funds R&DSpending on inventing and improving products and technology.; the R&D produces milestones like the 108-qubit launch; the milestones refresh the narrative. It is a genuine competitive advantage as long as it spins, and it is a genuine vulnerability the moment it stops, because the engine runs on share price, not on cash from customers.

Source: Rigetti FY2025 10-K and Q1 2026 materials.¹⁸⁹ A note on that $33.1 million of Q1 2026 “net incomeThe bottom-line profit or loss after all costs, interest, and taxes.”: it is an accounting mirage. Rigetti’s warrantsContracts giving the right to buy a company's stock at a set price later. Common in SPAC deals. are carried as liabilities that are re-valued every quarter against the share price. When the stock falls, the liability shrinks and the company books a paper gain; when the stock rises, it books a paper loss. Q1 2026 showed “net income” precisely because the stock fell that quarter (the warrant liabilityWarrants recorded as a liability and re-valued every quarter, creating paper gains or losses that are not real cash. dropped from $102.6M to $48.9M, a $53.7M non-cash gain).⁸ The full-year 2025 “loss” of $216 million is the same mechanism in reverse, inflated by a $150.6 million non-cash warrant charge as the stock soared.¹ Strip the mirage out and the truth is the non-GAAPAdjusted figures a company presents outside the official rules to show 'underlying' performance. Treat them with care. net loss line: a roughly $15 million quarterly loss from a real but tiny business.

Naming the archetype, and placing it on the arc

What kind of company story is this? Rigetti is not the Bully. The bullies of quantum are IBM, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, firms with research budgets larger than Rigetti’s entire market value and the patience to match. Rigetti is an Underdog, a pure-play scrapping against giants, and within that posture it is making a Better Mousetrap argument: not a different game from superconducting rivals, but a better way to build the same thing, through modular chipletsBuilding a large processor by tiling together many small, high-quality chips instead of making one giant chip whose yield collapses. and a captive foundryA factory that manufactures chips. Owning one lets a company iterate its own hardware faster than outsourcing.. There is a Missionary note in the official language (“solve humanity’s most important and pressing problems”),¹ but I would not mistake the veneer for the engine. The engine is the underdog-with-a-better-process.

On the company life cycle, Rigetti is a paradox: thirteen years old by the calendar, but a Start-up edging into Young Growth by every measure that counts. RevenueThe total money a company brings in from sales, before any costs are subtracted. is tiny and lumpy, losses are structural, and essentially all of the value is narrative because there is almost no operating history for the numbers to anchor to. This is the textbook situation where story drives value and the spreadsheet is along for the ride. As the company matures, if it matures, the numbers will gradually take the wheel. We are nowhere near that handoff yet.

The 3P test, and where the story can fail

I try to put every narrative through three escalating gates, and Rigetti is a useful case because it passes the first easily, passes the second only under a named condition, and does not clearly pass the third.

Is it possible? Yes, without strain. Rigetti has real machines on real clouds, a real fab, real customers paying real (if small) money, and lab results that already touch the fidelity targets it needs. Nothing here is vaporware.

Is it plausible? This is the gate that matters, and it is the one Figure 1 is built to expose. Quantum advantageA quantum computer solving a genuinely useful problem faster, cheaper, or better than the best classical computer., as Rigetti defines it, requires more than 1,000 qubitsThe basic unit of a quantum computer. Like a 'bit' in a normal computer, but instead of being only 0 or 1 it can be 0, 1, or a blend of both at once. at about 99.9 percent two-qubit fidelityThe accuracy of an operation acting on two qubits at once. It is the harder and more meaningful test of a machine's quality than a single-qubit gate. at sub-50-nanosecond gates, in roughly three years.⁶ But the company’s own data show fidelity slipping from 99.7 percent at 9 qubits to 99.1 percent at 108 qubits, because adding qubits stresses coherence.¹ So the plausibility of the story rests on a specific, demanding claim: that Rigetti can roughly multiply its qubit countThe raw number of physical qubits in a machine. A weak measure of power on its own, since quality and connectivity matter more. by ten or more AND simultaneously cut its error rate by close to an order of magnitude, reversing the very trend its recent systems display. The chipletBuilding a large processor by tiling together many small, high-quality chips instead of making one giant chip whose yield collapses. architecture makes the scaling half plausible; it is the fidelity half, climbing while you scale, that the story has to prove. Name that condition out loud and you have named the whole investment debate.

Is it probable? Here I will be honest rather than promotional. That Rigetti specifically emerges as a dominant winner capturing a large slice of the $90 to $170 billion hardware-and-software market that analysts sketch for the 2040s is not, in my judgment, the single most likely outcome, because the same superconducting bet is being pursued by IBM, Google, and Amazon with far deeper resources, and because an entirely different modalityThe underlying physical approach a quantum computer is built on (trapped ions, superconducting circuits, photonics, etc.). Choosing a quantum stock is partly a bet on which modality wins. could leapfrog the field. The more probable range of outcomes for Rigetti runs from “acquired for its fab and its patent stack,” to “one of several surviving superconducting players,” to “a narrative that breaks and takes the financing engine down with it.” The market value today is best understood not as a forecast of dominance but as the price of an option on the plausible case, an option the market has lately been very eager to own.

That eagerness is its own risk. These stocks trade on sentiment to a degree that should make any storyteller careful. Rigetti rose more than 500 percent over the trailing year, sold off sharply in January 2026 when commentary turned skeptical on quantum timelines,¹⁰ then jumped again in April 2026 when Nvidia embraced the sector.¹¹ A share that moves thirty percent on someone else’s press release is not being valued on Rigetti’s fundamentals. It is being valued on the mood of the story, and moods change.

Translating the story into value drivers

A story is only useful to an investor if it points at the handful of numbers that will actually decide the outcome. Here is the bridge from each narrative claim to the driver it implies and the figure that anchors it today. The valuationEstimating what a company is actually worth, typically from its projected future cash flows. work itself belongs to a separate exercise; my job is to hand it the right levers.

What I would watch, and what would change my mind

No story is permanent, so let me end by naming the events that would move this one, sorted by how hard they would hit.

Breaks (events that would decimate the story): a hard physical ceiling on superconducting coherence that caps fidelity below what advantage requires; a rival, or a rival modalityThe underlying physical approach a quantum computer is built on (trapped ions, superconducting circuits, photonics, etc.). Choosing a quantum stock is partly a bet on which modality wins., credibly demonstrating commercial quantum advantageA quantum computer solving a genuinely useful problem faster, cheaper, or better than the best classical computer. first, which would collapseThe instant a measurement forces a qubit from a blend of possibilities into one definite classical value. Rigetti’s option value overnight; or a sustained slump in the share price that jams the equity flywheel and forces a distressed raise. The financing engine is the soft underbelly here, because it depends on the narrative it is supposed to fund.

Changes (shifts that would rewrite the archetype): Rigetti moving from underdog to genuine leader by being first to a verified advantage-capable result on superconducting hardware, which would be a story upgrade; or the reverse, a key partner such as Quanta or a government sponsor stepping back. Watch, too, how the US Department of Commerce’s contemplated equity stake (priced at a fifteen percent discount under the May 2026 letter of intent)¹² evolves from validation into an ownership and governance overhang.

Shifts (smaller recalibrations): whether the 108-qubit system hits its promised ~99.5 percent fidelity by year-end;⁶ whether the “about three years” to quantum advantage stays at three or quietly becomes five, as quantum timelines across the industry have a habit of doing; whether the revenueThe total money a company brings in from sales, before any costs are subtracted. rebound visible in Q1 2026 ($4.4 million, three times the prior-year quarter, on system and Novera deliveries)⁹ is a real inflection or just lumpiness; and how fast the burn climbs as the UK build-out and added refrigeration capacity ramp.¹³

The honest summary is this. Rigetti is a thirteen-year-old start-up that nearly died, hired a fab man to save it, and used a soaring narrative to build a balance sheet that now buys it most of a decade to prove a hard physics-and-manufacturing thesis. The thesis is coherent and the runway is real. The valuation is a bet that the plausible case becomes the probable one, made by a market that has decided, for now, that it likes the story too much to wait for the numbers. Whether that affection is wisdom or the runaway enthusiasm that storytellers are paid to distrust is the question every reader of these filings has to answer for themselves.

Sources & notes

1. Rigetti Computing FY2025 Form 10-K (fiscal year ended December 31, 2025): full-year revenue of $7.1 million, down 34%; the 2013 founding and the superconducting-plus-fabrication strategy (gate speeds of roughly 50 to 70 nanoseconds); Fab-1 (commissioned 2016) as the industry’s first dedicated quantum integrated-circuit fab and the “design to fabrication to test” flywheel; the 2022 SPAC listing; the 84-qubit Ankaa-3 at 99.0% median two-qubit fidelity and the “world’s first multi-chip quantum processor”; 121 patents issued and 160 pending; the C-DAC order for a 108-qubit system to be deployed in Bengaluru in the second half of 2026; the $350 million ATM program (weighted-average $11.55 per share) and roughly $58.5 million of operating cash used in 2025; property and equipment and capital expenditure; the $150.6 million full-year non-cash warrant-liability charge; the $771.0 million accumulated deficit; and the company’s quantum-advantage definition (more than 1,000 qubits at about 99.9% fidelity and sub-50-nanosecond gates).
2. Rigetti shares traded around $25.86 on May 23, 2026, against a market capitalization variously reported near $8.6 to $8.8 billion; the 52-week range was roughly $10.30 to $58.15. StockAnalysis, stockanalysis.com/stocks/rgti, and Macrotrends, macrotrends.net.
3. Rigetti received a Nasdaq delisting notice in early 2023 with the stock trading near $1. HPCwire, February 2023, hpcwire.com.
4. Rigetti shareholders authorized a one-for-ten reverse split in 2024 to address renewed Nasdaq minimum-bid concerns; the split was never executed as the price recovered. HPCwire, October 2024, hpcwire.com; The Motley Fool, August 2025, fool.com.
5. Founder Chad Rigetti departed in December 2022; Dr. Subodh Kulkarni was appointed President and CEO effective December 12, 2022, after running CyberOptics (acquired by Nordson in 2022) and holding a PhD in chemical engineering from MIT, with earlier research-management roles at 3M and IBM. Inside Quantum Technology, insidequantumtechnology.com; The Quantum Insider, December 2022, thequantuminsider.com.
6. Rigetti May 2026 investor deck: the modality comparison (superconducting versus trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and photonic players, with gate speeds, qubit counts, and fidelities); Cepheus-1-36Q at about 99.6% median two-qubit fidelity; the 99.9%-at-28-nanoseconds prototype result and the quantum-advantage target (1,000+ qubits, 99.9% fidelity, sub-50-nanosecond gates); the ~$10,000-per-qubit versus ~$35,000 control-electronics comparison; the qubit-count roadmap; and the 108-qubit system’s ~99.5% fidelity target.
7. Rigetti press release, “Rigetti Announces General Availability of 108-Qubit System” (April 2026): the Cepheus-1-108Q (twelve 9-qubit chiplets) launching at about 99.1% median two-qubit fidelity and roughly 60-nanosecond gates, generally available across Rigetti’s cloud, Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure Quantum, and qBraid.
8. Rigetti Computing Q1 2026 Form 10-Q (quarter ended March 31, 2026): the five-year Quanta Computer collaboration ($35 million equity at $11.59 per share and a $250 million co-investment commitment); roughly $569 million of cash and investments with zero debt; and the quarterly warrant-liability revaluation (a drop from $102.6 million to $48.9 million, a $53.7 million non-cash gain that produced the reported $33.1 million of “net income”).
9. Rigetti Q1 2026 earnings slides: first-quarter 2026 revenue of $4.4 million (about three times the prior-year quarter), reflecting Novera QPU and system deliveries.
10. Quantum pure-plays including Rigetti showed extreme volatility into early 2026, with a sector sell-off in January 2026; Rigetti’s trailing-year gain was reported around 545%. The Motley Fool, December 2025, fool.com.
11. Quantum stocks, Rigetti among them, surged roughly 30%+ in mid-April 2026 after Nvidia unveiled open-source models aimed at quantum and reframed AI as essential to making quantum computing practical. CNBC, April 2026, cnbc.com.
12. Rigetti Form 8-K (May 2026) and the accompanying press release, “Rigetti Signs Letter of Intent with U.S. Government for Quantum Computing Research”: a letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce for an award of up to $100 million, under which the Department would be issued Rigetti common stock priced at a fifteen percent (15%) discount.
13. Rigetti press release, “Rigetti Computing Intends to Invest $100 Million in UK to Accelerate Quantum Computing Development”: the company’s stated intent to invest up to $100 million in the United Kingdom.