Rigetti announced its second quarter 2022 financial results with revenues of $2.1 million versus $1.5 million in the second quarter of 2021. Gross profit increased slightly to about $1.3 million from about $1.2 million in the prior year. Total GAAP Operating Expenses for the second quarter 2022 were $26.9 million versus $10.9 million in the same period a year ago due to increases in headcount and other expenses due to its transition to a public company. Adjusted EBITDA loss was $15.1 million compared to $8.1 million in 2021. And Net GAAP loss was about the same at $10.0 million in Q2 2022 versus $10.1 million in Q2 2021 helped by accounting changes in fair value of certain items and other factors.
In their earnings call, CEO Chad Rigetti highlighted several areas of technical progress. To describe the speed performance of their hybrid classical/quantum systems Rigetti has adopted the CLOPS (Circuit Layer Operations per Second) measure originally introduced by IBM. They announced that they have made significant improvements in the measure this year and are now exceeding 4000 CLOPS on both their 40 qubit and 80 qubit systems. For comparison, the best CLOPS measurement that IBM has publicly reported so far is 2900, although we do expect IBM to announce further improvements later this year. No other company has announced CLOPS measurements for there systems yet. Rigetti was one of the pioneers in pursuing closely coupled classical and quantum processors in a hybrid configuration since its early founding. So, this development that they are doing well in that measure is not surprising.
Rigetti also announced good progress on their next generation 84 qubit device and expects to start testing first silicon this month. This chip is expected to show significant performance improvements due to a new lattice and the use of tunable coupler elements that appear to be similar to those used in the Google Sycamore chip. Rigetti is planning to have an 84 qubit processor based upon this new chip in early 2023 and a 336 qubits process using four of the 84 chips that are connected together in late 2023. They also announced progress in their partnership with Ampere in integrating Ampere’s high performance processing platform with Rigetti’s quantum systems and running tests for quantum machine learning applications using the combined platform.
Rigetti also described progress in customer engagements. They have successfully launched their 32 qubit Aspen process in the UK as part of a consortium with several UK partners. Also, they have won two Innovate UK awards as part of the ISCF Commercializing Quantum Technologies Challenge. And they have recently been selected to lead a program with several partners to develop benchmarks for quantum application performance on large-scale quantum computers. Provided the program proceeds through both 18 month phases, the total amount of this benchmarking program awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will be $2.9 million over a three year period with Rigetti receiving about $1.5 million and the other partners receiving the rest. .
Rigetti also announced some additional financial transactions. In order to ensure they will have enough working capital in the case of a prolonged downturn in the market, they have reached an agreement with B. Riley Principal Capital II, LLC for a committed equity facility, sometimes nicknamed a “synthetic ATM” for up to $75 million dollars. This facility will provide Rigetti an option, but no obligation, to sell up to $75 million worth of newly issued shares to B. Riley over a 24 month period at the volume weighted average price of the common stock. In consideration for B. Riley’s commitment to this agreement, Rigetti has issued to B. Riley 171,008 shares of common stock.
For more information about Rigetti’s Q2 financial results, you can view their press release here, listing to their conference call here, and review their filings on the SEC website here.
August 12, 2022