管理層發言
Ladies and gentlemen, greetings, and welcome to the Quantum Computing Inc. Second Quarter 2026 Shareholder Update Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following management's remarks, the call line will be opened for questions. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, John Nesbett with IMS Investor Relations.
Thank you, and I want to welcome everyone to Quantum Computing Inc. Second Quarter 2026 Shareholder Update Call. Before we begin, please note that today's remarks may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding expected results, operational plans, strategy, and market opportunities. These statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provision of Section 27A of the Securities Act and Section 21E of the Exchange Act and are based on current assumptions and expectations. Forward-looking statements are neither promises nor guarantees and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Important risk factors are discussed in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended 12/31/2025 and in subsequent SEC filings, including the quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 06/30/2026. We undertake no obligation to update these statements except as required by law. On the call today, we have Dr. Yuping Huang, chief executive officer and chairman, and Christopher Bruce Roberts, chief financial officer. The team will provide an update on the business followed by a question-and-answer session. With that, I will now turn the call over to management. Please go ahead, Yuping.
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Quantum Computing Inc. Second Quarter 2026 earnings call. During the second quarter, we continued to build on the momentum established in the first quarter, executing on our quantum roadmap while expanding the technologies and manufacturing capabilities that enable both our quantum systems and a growing portfolio of commercial products and services. We also made meaningful progress in our transition toward scalable, cost-effective production of miniaturized quantum products based on nanophotonics and advanced packaging. As I have said before, our goal is simple: to put quantum products and the technologies into the hands of everybody. Everything we do at QCI is focused on making quantum systems smaller, more practical, more affordable, and ultimately more accessible. At our core, QCI is a quantum technology company. Our long-term vision is to develop quantum systems built on nanophotonics and advanced packaging that can be manufactured at scale and deployed across real-world applications.
Supporting this strategy is the expansion of our portfolio of photonic components, lasers, detectors, photonic integrated circuits, thin-film lithium-niobate technologies, optical packaging, advanced packaging, and U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing and foundry services. These products and services address growing commercial markets today while providing the core technologies and manufacturing capabilities that will enable our current customers' access to the next-generation quantum systems. This integrated approach is central to our strategy: by investing in commercially relevant photonics and semiconductor technologies we are creating value today while building the engineering expertise, manufacturing scale, and production infrastructure needed to enable our long-term quantum roadmap. During the first half of the year, we completed three strategic acquisitions that significantly expanded our commercialization efforts, technical capabilities, manufacturing capacities, and engineering talent.
Together, these acquisitions have strengthened our ability to serve multiple high-growth markets while creating a more integrated company serving customers in photonic semiconductor manufacturing, AI, defense, aerospace, telecommunications, and quantum technologies. Each acquisition contributes unique technologies that strengthen our portfolio of intellectual property, and we are already seeing the benefits of integrating these organizations. Just as importantly, we have welcomed some of the industry's leading engineers and scientists who are now focused on advancing our mission to deliver practical, scalable, and accessible quantum solutions. During the second quarter, we completed the strategic acquisition of Enhanced Semiconductor, Inc., allowing us to launch our Fab-2 initiative ahead of schedule to advance key roadmap development goals and expand manufacturing capabilities. Enhanced is the leading independent U.S.-based advanced package foundry with deep expertise in integration, hybrid bonding, chiplet architectures, silica interposers, photonic device integration, and advanced semiconductor packaging and manufacturing.
The Enhanced acquisition immediately expands our advanced packaging and semiconductor manufacturing capabilities in core nanophotonics areas and beyond, while strengthening the production infrastructure supporting our thin-film lithium-niobate platform and the future quantum products. Importantly, it also adds to our customer base, production capacity, operational flexibility, and brings an experienced engineering team, positioning us to better serve both commercial and government customers today while accelerating commercial development of next-generation photonic and quantum technologies. In April, we announced that Neurawave, our next-generation photonic reservoir computing platform, reached commercial readiness. Neurawave combines photonic and digital computing to deliver fast, energy-efficient AI inference and advanced signal processing at the edge. It is designed to support a broad range of applications across defense, telecommunications, autonomous vehicles, robotics, health care, industrial monitoring, and other markets where real-time intelligence and low-power operations are critical.
Neurawave also demonstrates the versatility of our photonics platform. The technologies we are developing extend well beyond quantum computing, enabling differentiated solutions across AI, communications, sensing, and edge computing. This allows us to participate in large and growing commercial markets while continuing to advance our quantum roadmap. In June, we successfully delivered and installed our Dirac-3 quantum optimization machine at a global consulting firm, marking another important commercial milestone for QCI. The Dirac-3 system is being deployed to support our customer's engagements with their enterprise customers on complex optimization challenges, including portfolio optimization. This deployment demonstrates the growing interest in practical quantum optimization solutions and reflects our continued progress in bringing commercially relevant quantum technologies into real-world customer environments.
Also in June, we reached a framework agreement with Planck Dynamics that included an initial purchase order for five of our Neurawave photonic reservoir computing systems. Beyond this initial order, the agreement provides a pathway for the potential deployment of multiple dozens of Neurawave systems as customer milestones are achieved, representing a potential aggregate program value of more than $10 million. We view this as an important validation of our photonic computing technology, its commercial readiness, and its ability to address emerging AI infrastructure requirements on a commercial scale. We also expanded the commercial reach of our quantum communication portfolio with a purchase order from a world-leading university for our quantum secure communications system. The university plans to evaluate our technology as part of its broader research and development effort for quantum secure networking for next-generation communication infrastructure.
We believe this order reflects continued commercial traction for our quantum communications solution and growing recognition of the role quantum secure communications will play in the networks of the future. During the second quarter, we attended eight industry conferences to broaden our visibility and strengthen our strategic partnerships across the quantum ecosystem. These engagements, including the 5th Annual Economist Commercializing Quantum Global 2026 Conference, the Quantum Tech World Conference, and the Optical Quantum Industry Summit, gave us the opportunity to connect with customers, government stakeholders, and prospective partners while showcasing our expanding photonics and quantum optics capabilities. Looking ahead, we remain focused on two complementary growth engines. First, we will continue to move aggressively along our quantum technology roadmap, leveraging our differentiated room-temperature photonic architecture to develop quantum systems that are smaller, more scalable, and more practical for real-world deployment.
As these technologies become commercially viable, it allows us to better serve our existing customer base who will be exploring use cases for these systems. Second, we will continue to grow our commercial portfolio of photonic components, lasers, detectors, photonic integrated circuits, thin-film lithium-niobate technologies, optical packaging, advanced packaging, semiconductor manufacturing, and other foundry services. These products and services generate revenue and address attractive market opportunities today while providing technologies, manufacturing activities, and production scale that directly support and enable our long-term quantum strategy. Our scalable manufacturing strategy has accelerated significantly with the expansion from our Fab-1 facility in Tempe, Arizona to the launch of Fab-2 through the Enhanced acquisition. Together, these facilities strengthen our ability to serve commercial customers across multiple industries, support government programs, expand U.S.-based manufacturing services, and scale production as demand grows.
We continue to see commercial validation through new customer engagements, strategic partnerships, and government programs across both our commercial photonic business and our quantum products. We believe our unique combination of photonics innovation, semiconductor manufacturing, advanced packaging, and quantum technology positions QCI to create sustainable long-term value by serving customers across a broad and expanded set of high-growth markets while continuing to build technologies that will define the future of quantum computing. As we execute on our roadmap, our focus remains unchanged: putting quantum into the hands of everybody. We are moving quantum out of the laboratory and into business, government agencies, critical infrastructure, and ultimately everyday applications. Our room-temperature, chip-scale photonic architecture is a key differentiator—dramatically reducing system complexity, power consumption, and cost while enabling practical deployment in real-world environments.
We believe the combination of our quantum technology leadership, expanding photonics portfolio, and growing manufacturing capabilities positions QCI to help shape the next generation of information processing while creating long-term value for our customers and shareholders. Now I am going to turn the call over to Christopher Bruce Roberts, who is going to review the financials. Christopher?
Thank you, Yuping. It is my pleasure to review QCI's financial performance for the second quarter. Revenue for the second quarter of 2026 totaled $5.6 million compared to $61 thousand in the second quarter of 2025, and $3.7 million in the first quarter of this year. All business units of the company contributed to the second quarter revenue, which derives from a broad cross section of government, educational, and commercial customers. Second quarter revenue came mainly from the sales of various photonics products that are critical to our quantum roadmap and a wide range of existing industrial applications. Operating expenses for the second quarter totaled $21.8 million compared to $10.2 million in the second quarter of 2025, an increase of 114%. The year-over-year increase was largely due to increases in personnel and related payroll costs for R&D efforts, sales and marketing, as well as acquisition-related transaction expenses of approximately $7.3 million.
Interest and other income for the quarter totaled $13 million compared to $1.8 million in the second quarter of 2025. The increase in interest income was due to interest generated from the company's larger cash position compared with last year. The company reported a net loss of $11.8 million, or a loss of $0.05 per share for the second quarter of 2026 compared to a net loss of $36.5 million or $0.26 per basic share for the prior year period. The main reason for the decrease in net loss was the change in the fair value of a derivative liability. To give you some detail: in the second quarter of 2025, the company recognized a $28 million noncash loss on the mark-to-market valuation of the company's warrant derivative liability compared to a mark-to-market loss of only $1.7 million in the second quarter of 2026. I want to emphasize these are noncash losses and they are, as previously disclosed, related to the merger with QPhoton in June 2022 and the warrants issued with that transaction.
Our balance sheet continues to be strong. Total assets as of 06/30/2026 were approximately $1.6 billion, relatively unchanged compared to December 31. Cash, cash equivalents, and investments totaled approximately $1.3 billion as of 06/30/2026, compared to approximately $1.5 billion at year end 2025. The cash balance reported at the end of the second quarter reflects expenditures for our acquisitions of Luminar Semiconductor, NuCrypt, and Enhanced Semiconductor, for which we used approximately $180 million in cash including transaction expenses. Total liabilities as of 06/30/2026 were $47.2 million, an increase of $26.5 million compared to year end 2025. As of June 30, the company has stockholders' equity of $1.6 billion. Our contract backlog as of June 30, 2026 was approximately $42.5 million. And I will now turn the call back over to Yuping.
Thank you, Christopher. As we look ahead to the second half of 2026, we remain focused on integrating our recent acquisitions and unlocking the full value of the talent, technology, and manufacturing capabilities they bring to QCI. We continue to advance our transition from research, innovation, and prototyping toward scalable commercial manufacturing, positioning us to meet growing demand across our target markets. We are encouraged by the momentum in our commercial and government contract pipeline and remain committed to executing on the partnerships that extend our reach and credibility in the marketplace. As always, we will continue to evaluate targeted acquisition opportunities that strategically strengthen our organization and drive our path to scale. All of this is underpinned by a strong balance sheet which gives us the financial flexibility to invest in our organization and strategically pursue those opportunities from a position of strength.
We remain guided by our core principle of practicality first, scalability by design, and innovation with a purpose as we build the future of quantum for everyone. Our strategy is straightforward: move aggressively to commercialize quantum technologies while continuing to expand the photonics, semiconductor, and advanced manufacturing capabilities that create value today and provide the foundation for the quantum industry of tomorrow. Thank you for your time today and your continued support of Quantum Computing Inc. We look forward to updating you on our continued progress throughout the rest of the year. Operator, please open up the call for questions.
分析師問答
Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question-and-answer session. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please while we poll for questions. And the first question today is coming from John McPeak from Rosenblatt Securities. John, your line is live.
Thank you. Congrats to Yuping and Christopher on closing Enhanced and the progress here. I have a few questions. The first is on Dirac-3 — the enhancements that you have been talking about related to additional variables being enabled in the system. Anything you can talk about there, Yuping?
Thanks, John. Certainly, on Dirac-3, in the past we reported clear advantages of using quantum effects, but we also realized that for wide adoption we needed to provide more functionality and be able to handle more variables. I am very happy to report that we have made pretty good progress on that. I would advise you to watch out for some news coming out in the coming month. Personally, I am very happy and excited about the progress that we have made. That could unlock some additional markets with more variables. I am pretty confident on that.
And then if I just have one follow-up: with the Enhanced acquisition, have your CapEx needs changed relative to Fab-2, because they are bringing some packaging and other capabilities to you?
That is a really good question. We are looking closely at what we need to do to upgrade the capability at the Enhanced facility. They can currently do roughly 60,000 wafers a year, so it is a substantial increase over our Fab-1. But there are some features we would like to add. We are looking at less than it would take to build out a whole new facility. So probably in the $50 million to $100 million range. Probably $75 million is what we are looking at, but we do not have that finalized yet. It is still in the planning stages, and we are probably not going to spend anywhere near that this year.
Okay. Great. Thanks. I will get back in the queue. Thanks, guys.
Okay. Thank you, John.
The next question is coming from Max Michaelis from Lake Street Capital Markets. Max, your line is live.
Yeah, guys. A few questions from me. Thanks for giving that backlog data: $42.5 million at the end of June. Just curious to know how that has trended in the past month or two?
Are you talking about up to June 30 or after June 30? $42.5 is up to June 30. With the kind of contracts we are dealing with, the backlog tends to move in fits and spurts. There will be quiet weeks and then very big weeks. So there has not been a lot of change in the last 40 days. As you can imagine, a lot of the increase from the backlog we reported at the end of Q1 is related to Enhanced, but we have also had a pretty good run of business development success across the company. One way to think about the backlog is that these are not quick-turn contracts. These are contracts that will be performed over a period of 12 to 18 months. So we are not expecting to burn the backlog up between now and December. If nothing else came in, this would keep us going until the third quarter of next year, maybe a little bit longer.
Perfect. And then just going off of the Q2 revenue, you touched on the range of government, education, and commercial customers. Which end market do you feel like you are having the best headway with right now in terms of customer conversations and potential orders? Maybe stack rank those end markets.
Right now, we are primarily a provider to government agencies, mainly through subcontracts. Commercial would be second, and education is a distant third in terms of markets. That is true across the entire company: a large portion of the work we are doing is in subcontracts to primes on both the civil side as well as aerospace and defense. We expect that is probably going to continue for a while, but we are seeing a lot of interest in commercial markets for quantum and other products, so we think the balance is going to gradually shift over time. Right now, roughly 70% to 80% of our business comes from government contracting, mainly as a subcontractor.
Yes.
Alright, that is it for me. Thanks for taking my questions.
Sure.
Thank you.
The next question will be from Troy Jensen from Cantor Fitzgerald. Troy, your line is live.
Hey, gentlemen. Congrats on all the progress here. Maybe I will start with you, Yuping. I have seen a couple of optimization examples, and it seemed like a quantum computer was in the background driving it. Can you explain: is Dirac an application working with other systems, or how should I think about it?
Troy, you were breaking up a little bit.
Troy, I could not hear you well earlier. Please go ahead.
I had to step outside. I guess I have seen some of these optimization examples in the past, and it seems like they are always being driven by a quantum computer in the background. Is Dirac an application that integrates with other systems? Please explain a little more.
As you know, Troy, the Dirac-3 machines were designed specifically to solve some very complex NP-hard optimization problems. The purpose of Dirac-3 is to utilize quantum effects to better solve those NP-hard problems that are very challenging to solve on classical machines, which often get trapped in local minima. We have found that the quantum effects utilized in the Dirac machines can indeed help hop out of local minima. The advantage stems similarly to quantum annealing but with the distinction that it is not a quantum annealing machine. Instead, it is room temperature and we use photonics. In the past, both our own engineers and outside users have benchmarked our machine against other optimization machines using quantum effects, and they have reported clear advantages over both classical approaches and other quantum machines they can access in the market. On the other hand, we also understand that for our technology to be widely adopted, we needed to continue to reduce SWaP-C parameters while supporting more variables and improving the quality of the solutions. This is what our team has been focused on, and recently we have made very exciting progress that will help us connect with more customers and provide more quantum value for practical applications.
And then maybe a follow-up for Christopher. Could you give us any help on a revenue or OPEX contribution from the Enhanced acquisition?
Sure. We are still not giving formal guidance, Troy, but I want to point you to the pro formas in the most recent 10-Q that was filed this afternoon — I think the relevant details are in footnote 4. Those pro formas show the breakout by company of revenue by quarter for the first six months of this year and the first six months of last year, and they illustrate how variable the year-over-year revenue can be. This is a lumpy business. In the first half of last year, Enhanced did about $16 million. The earn-out goals for 2027 are predicated on a $35 million revenue target. If you look at the pro formas, their numbers have gone down a bit more recently as some of the business mix has shifted and some funding on a big navy contract has been pushed into next year. So let me answer in two parts: we stand by the models we have seen that showed QCI (before Enhanced) doing $20 million to $25 million for this year. The estimate that Enhanced will contribute is somewhere between the $7 million and $16 million range they have done in the past. It is going to depend on how quickly some of these projects are delivered and accepted by their customers, and that is hard to predict when you are doing cutting-edge development work. Sometimes you get it done on schedule, and sometimes it takes longer. We are trying to be cautious and not get over our skis on this. I hope that helps.
We have a growing backlog, but due to the inherent challenges of technical completion and delivery, it is really hard to predict on a quarter-by-quarter basis. It is a little easier in the aggregate for a full year.
I would caution on backloading if you are modeling. I promise to be CFO-friendly.
Thank you.
The next question will be from Nehal Chokshi from Northland Capital Markets. Nehal, your line is live.
Thank you. Yuping, you mentioned that Dirac-3 has been benchmarked against other optimization machines and you are seeing significant advantage. Is this data already published and freely available to everyone, or is this information you have received from the customer so far?
I believe at least a portion of the data has been published in journals, and I have also seen some of our customers reporting their findings in presentations. Most of our internal benchmark data, on the other hand, we have not published. Nehal, I can ask the team to provide you a collection of the papers and presentations either by our own engineers or by external users.
That would be great; we would love to see that. In the analog quantum computing space, I think you have two primary competitors with two different modalities. Do you see one of those two competitors being a particularly stronger competitor in that space?
I would answer this way: we all have our own designs for quantum computers, but at the end of the day it will be the customers and the applications that define the value of any quantum machine. According to many market researchers and our conversations with customers, optimization problems currently have perhaps the largest market potential; that is one reason we started focusing on optimization using quantum effects. Down the road, I believe gate-based machines will find more applications; this is part of our roadmap as well. We started with the quantum optimization machine without gates, but we have been working on the basis for gate-based machines. Using photonics, it is much harder, but once we overcome the engineering challenges we can look at the opportunity to mass-produce such quantum photonic-based machines to support volume production and reduce unit price. At QCI, our mission is to democratize quantum: to put quantum into the hands of many people. It is much harder to construct gates with single photons, but once we overcome this difficulty the manufacturing would be much easier. I think we are climbing the last half mile of the mountain, and I am happy with the progress our team has been making on the gate-based machine as well. So do not take me wrong: we currently do not have a gate-based machine yet, but we have been making very good progress.
Thank you. Just to follow up on the quantum gate: you mentioned single photons as a key element. Are there other engineering challenges beyond managing optical loss to the point of maintaining the integrity of a single photon throughout the quantum computer path?
That is a great question. For a gate-based quantum machine using single photons, photon-photon interaction is most critical and also most challenging because it is the basis for logic. In addition to demonstrating gate fidelity, to construct a complete machine that functions at room temperature and can be integrated with other computing platforms such as GPU and CPU, we need a safe, contained system requiring integrated lasers, single-photon detectors, and controlling electronics all on a single chip. This is a fundamental reason why we acquired Luminar Semiconductor and Enhanced: we are developing heterogeneous integrated chips to support our quantum computing platform and other quantum technologies including sensing, communications, and photonic AI.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you. The next question is coming from Edward Woo from Ascendiant Capital. Edward, your line is live.
Yes. Congratulations on the progress and on increasing commercial scale. Would you have to invest significantly in a salesforce to expand your commercial opportunities?
Actually, yes. We announced about two weeks ago that we hired Susan G. Hunt as our new Chief Revenue Officer and our previous CRO is now in charge of product management. Susan has an aggressive plan that includes hiring key people in both commercial and government sales. While we do have a reasonable-sized salesforce today, we are going to emphasize sales going forward and try to build the backlog up as fast as we can.
Indeed. The reason we made this change is that our technology and manufacturing capabilities have reached an inflection point. We are now ready to embrace the market at a sizable scale and bring our technology and product into a much larger market because we are ready on the technology side and on manufacturing readiness.
Great. Thanks for answering my question, and I wish you guys good luck.
Thank you.
That does conclude today's Q&A session. I would now like to hand the call back over to management for closing remarks.
Thank you, everybody, for joining our earnings call. If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to our investor relations. I wish everybody a nice rest of the day. Thank you.
This does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.