Rigetti Computing narrowly beat second-quarter revenue forecasts in the latest sign that sales of its quantum computers are gathering speed.
Rigetti posted total revenue of $5.14 million for the quarter, a sharp increase from the $1.8 million reported in the year-ago period and narrowly ahead of analysts' calls for $5.09 million. The company had logged $4.4 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2026.
Shares rose 4.9% on Friday, building on premarket gains. Still, they trailed behind sector peers IonQ and D-Wave Quantum, which gained 9.9% and 5.2%, respectively.
It's worth noting that Rigetti is posting a fraction of what some industry peers are generating. IonQ, for instance, posted $80.1 million in revenue for its latest quarter, fueled by demand for its physical systems as well as its cloud services.
The company faced a setback at the start of this year, when it delayed the release of its Cepheus-1-108Q system as it targeted certain technical milestones. Other updates in 2026, however, have been more encouraging, including signs that Rigetti was growing on-premise system sales.
Rigetti began selling its earliest on-premise systems in 2021, eight years after its founding. The company began offering remote access to its quantum processors in 2017 through its proprietary Quantum Cloud Services platform.
But system sales continue to be a metric to watch. As they fetch millions of dollars at a time, the transactions provide substantial revenue infusions -- and bode well for growth if Rigetti can scale its business.
The company said Thursday that it was fulfilling recently announced orders for systems using its Novera processor, as well as a major order to India's Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
The latest numbers demonstrated how large deals can shape the company's trajectory. Rigetti's deferred revenue -- cash collected ahead of product or service delivery -- increased by nearly $2.5 million in the first half of the year.
Under accrual accounting, companies cannot recognize cash as revenue until performance obligations are met, so advance collections sit on the balance sheet as a liability. In 2025, this metric remained roughly flat, indicating that upfront cash collections paced evenly with recognized revenue.
CEO Subodh Kulkarni explained on the earnings call that the change was tied to the C-DAC deal. "With that order, there were some prepayments and so forth that added to deferred revenue," he said. "So that was the main driver there."
Rigetti announced last month that it planned to deliver a quantum computer to a new test bed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, backed by a National Science Foundation grant. The deployment builds on an existing strategic partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Even as adoption of its systems grows, Rigetti's losses continued to widen. The company posted a $28.1 million operating loss for the second quarter. While that's steeper than the $20.4 million loss the company reported last year, the change could be worse. D-Wave doubled its operating loss in the latest quarter.
Rigetti's per-share loss, adjusted for one-time items, was five cents, in line with consensus views. Like its peers, the company continues to operate at a net loss as it works to improve its technology, with broader industrywide commercialization expected before the end of the decade.
One of the strongest validations of Rigetti's technology came in the form of a letter of intent with the Commerce Department in May. Under its terms, Rigetti will receive $100 million in federal funding in exchange for an equity stake in its business consistent with the award amount. Rigetti indicated Thursday that the agreement has yet to be completed.
Challenges undoubtedly lie ahead as the quantum landscape grows more crowded. After a lull last year, there has been a spate of market listings this year -- none more consequential than the public debut of Honeywell spinout Quantinuum, now one of the industry's largest players by market value.
Analysts and executives may argue that a rising tide lifts all boats -- a theme evidenced by May's federal funding push, which broadly boosted the sector -- but Rigetti must actively differentiate itself to attract customers.
The company harnesses a superconducting quantum architecture, one of the most mature and heavily funded approaches to building quantum systems. But Rigetti specifically is pursuing a chiplet-based approach in an attempt to make building large systems easier.
One hurdle to scaling quantum systems is that adding qubits -- the basic units of information in a quantum computer -- generally correlates to higher error rates. By using chiplets, Rigetti hopes to build larger systems with multiple interconnected chips rather than packing more qubits onto a single chip.
The company ended the second quarter with no debt and what it calls a "strong cash position" to fund future investments in its technology. As of June 30, Rigetti held $541.3 million in cash, cash equivalents, and available-for-sale investments.
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