Earnings Call: Q1 2026

Mar 19, 2026

Earnings release

Good morning, everyone, welcome to our first quarter 2026 results and a business update. I'm Brian Stringer. I'm Chief Financial Officer for 01 Quantum Inc. With me today is Andrew Cheung, our Chief Executive Officer. The agenda today will be, Andrew will give a presentation of the company, of the results, a business update on how we're progressing, and that'll be wrapped up by a Q&A. I'll moderate the Q&A at the end. Everybody knows, I think by now on Zoom calls how to use the Q&A. There's a button at the bottom where a Q&A, just click it. Send me the question and we'll get to it, time permitting, at the end of the presentation. Now, if you notice, we have our disclaimer, which forms a integral part of this presentation. Take a few seconds to look it over, please. With that, I'll now turn it over to Andrew for the presentation. Thank you, Brian. How are you doing? I'm Andrew, the President and CEO of 01 Quantum. We specialize in making everything quantum safe, which is guarding against hackers who are using quantum computers to do the dirty works. We started doing this about 7 years ago, maybe more than 7 years ago, invested over $7 million to reach where we are today. We are the first one in the post-quantum cybersecurity space that has crossed into revenue generations last year. We are carrying over this advantage into 2026 and beyond, I'm gonna give you all the details later. Our value proposition is very simple. I won't go into the details about how quantum computer works, what they are, you know, quantum annealing or whatever. All I want to say is that their excessive computing power has created an unprecedented cybersecurity threat for the world, or AKA Q-Day, which is the day when the bad guys are using quantum computers to do the dirty works. On and after Q-Day, essentially everything under the sun that is protected by today's cryptographic technology, such as RSA elliptic curve, will becomes totally naked in front of a quantum computer. Now, Q-Day concerns everyone not only because it is mathematically proven by Shor's algorithm that it can crack those RSA and elliptic curve algorithms, but it is also affecting everything from email to financial to medical, AI, cryptocurrency, just to name a few. Major enterprises like Apple, Google, Microsoft have already started their PQC conversion, post-quantum cryptography conversion journey already. If you don't believe in how business people handle Q-Day, you should at least listen to the government. First of all, the U.S. President's office back in 2022 had already issued an official letter, NSM-10, warning that the agencies to be very mindful of a famous attack called HNDL, Harvest Now Decrypt Later, whereby the hackers are obtaining the encrypted data, they hold onto it and wait until they get hold of a quantum computer that is powerful enough, then do the hacking. The problem is not a problem of tomorrow, but a problem today or even yesterday. No wonder why Howard Lutnick, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce on a CNBC interview about eight months ago, openly said that the worldwide cybersecurity will be totally broken by quantum computers if we don't act immediately. In addition to that, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA also said that we are now in an inflection point, while Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum also said that there are 20% chance that Q-Day would arrive by 2029. This is dovetailed by the announcement from IBM that they expect to have a full fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029. The most concerning fact to me is that all these writings on the wall are only from the open world. There are some closed worlds, such as Russia and China, whose vendor never published their roadmap. My biggest worry is kind of like a deep sea, like event in the quantum world, that 1 day a company you never heard of the name suddenly announced a quantum computer that beats everything. If you're not prepared by that day, basically you're toasted. The bottom line is that you have to act now before it's too late, because the difference between Q-Day ready 2 years ago, sorry, 2 years too early versus 1 day too late is basically everything. I keep reiterating that unlike most of our competitors who aim to license their PQC technology for others to do the PQC journey conversion, we are doing it differently. Instead, you know, we are giving it away for free, right. As long as our customers are using us to help them during the conversion journey. For example, you know, they can say that, yeah, we give you a quantum vulnerable product, and all we want is that you guys spit out on the other side a quantum safe version, right. This kind of business model had proven early success versus our competitors who are still in largely in pre-money stage. We have already, you know, generated revenue and created some solutions for our customers already. The first, like, of these type of product we have created was for Hitachi head office in Japan. Earlier last year, they asked us to kind of like what I just mentioned, they asked us to help them converting their remote access offering to become quantum-safe. We spent about 6, 7 months going through a very tough software engineering process, successfully completed the task, and a joint press release has been issued about 2 months ago. Now, remote access is very susceptible to HOD and HND or to Harvest Now, Decrypt Later attack because your encrypted communication session can be recorded by hackers, which is kind of like a history book of all your corporate activities that will becomes naked when the hackers eventually get hold of the quantum computers, right? That they can do the hacking. Being quantum safe gives Hitachi a huge edge, and they are now actively selling this in Japan. Hitachi is selling a server version, which is starting price about $6,000 and a SaaS Software as a Service subscription model for about $15 per month. We typically receive a one-time engineering fee plus ongoing revenue sharing. We don't need to spend. The beauty is that we don't need to spend a dime doing sales and marketing. We just sit back, being the SME, subject matter expert, and collect royalties. A risk-free business. The second application that we have created was to help a crypto foundation. We have started working on crypto POC, proof of concept more than, like, 3 years ago because we believe cryptocurrencies will likely be the, the probably the lowest hanging fruit for quantum attack because of the heavy financial incentive, as well as the total open nature of cryptocurrencies/blockchain technologies. Essentially, crypto is a perfect storm for HNDL attack because hackers can easily obtain the public key of any crypto wallet, and they simply hold on to the list of public key and then up to their mercy of which wallet they want first when they get hold of a powerful enough quantum computer. A Q Labs Foundation asked us to create for them a truly quantum-safe token. Despite the bear market, they call it the $qONE token. They went through a successful ICO in February about a month ago. We are currently in the final stage before commercial launching at the end of April, allowing the token $qONE to be used as a quote, unquote, "quantum gas fee" for crypto users to pay to protect their layer-1 asset like Hyperliquid, the HYPE token, the Ethereum token, Solana token, etc., against Q-Day threats, of course. This exercise, throughout this exercise, we have applied 3 patents protection. One was granted and 2 more in a patent pending stage. The market size is huge because the whole $4 trillion digital asset market must be protected against Q-Day threat. Similar to Hitachi, we are also receiving a 1-time engineering fee plus 22 million number of these $qONE token as the compensation. A simple math is that for every dollar worth of these PQC gas fee that it would eventually achieve, it would represent $22.5 million worth, you know, for us. Again, we don't need to spend sales and marketing dollar. We just sit back being their subject matter expert and collect royalties. Another risk-free business. Now, the third one is our own product, which is the world first truly quantum safe end-to-end email security product, IronCAP X. It complies with the NIST FIPS 203 and 204 encryptions and digital signature standard. With the quantum safe digital signature, it basically guarantees the authenticity of the sender, hence effectively plugging the hole of phishing email, which is 91% the source of ransomware attack. Its end-to-end encryption guarantees privacy, which is a big blind spot, in my opinion, in the usage of email since day one, especially for the highly confidential professional industries such as financial, legal, accounting, etc. Most importantly, we made it operating as a plugin of Microsoft Office Outlook, which is the de facto standard in corporate emails. In other words, we are mainstream ready, pending proper marketing budgets. The marketing, the market size is huge, like the total addressable market is very simple, that there are 730 million business email addresses in the world. If only 10% of them are serious and wanting some quantum protection and paying $3 a month, that's a potential $2.6 billion annual revenue up for grab for us. After that, right, besides all these 3 revenue generators that we have already created, we are also cooking another I would call it bigger than the combination of all these 3 in this year and next year. We have a unique invention that is kinda like a crossover between AI and quantum safety. If there's 1 single obstacle that prevent AI from doing its full potential, it's privacy. AI operations today are performed in an unencrypted fashion totally, and the privacy applies not only on the user data that breaches business confidentiality, compliance, national securities, et cetera, but also the AI model itself can be pirated, right? There's a huge market need for privacy preserved AI operations, and we have these solutions. During the most of 2024 and last year, we have invested heavily in creating a patent-pending technology that we call Quantum AI Wrappers, QAW technology. This is basically using fully homomorphic encryption technology to encrypt both the user data and the AI model before performing AI inference. Together with quantum safe communication, we have essentially protected the privacy of both the user data and the AI model, while at the same time operating everything in a quantum safe fashion. This year and next year will largely be our market building stage for the QAW market as professional services and managed services. The total addressable market is huge, growing from $0.9 billion, because basically it's paralyzed, as I mentioned earlier, by privacy, last year to $5.4 billion by 2032. The fully homomorphic encryption subset alone has a size of $850 million by 2028 already. While the sub-segment of finance, government, and healthcare alone has a size of $650 million. It's very sizable addressable market that we are diving into. Our value proposition is very straightforward, which is to protect the user data and the IP of the AI model. A user data protection allow compliance and national securities related users to take a full advantage of public AI without worrying about privacy. This also opens for dedicated and on-premise deployed business. Finally, we are also creating an Amazon or eBay-alike AI marketplace where we allow AI model vendors to list their model for users to search and use in a total quantum secure fashion. We simply, in this kind of a marketplace, we again, similar to Amazon and eBay, we simply share 15%-25% of the usage revenue and we will build, bill for the AI model and deposit for them and taking a percentage as our commission. This value proposition also allow us to open to government funding and procurement opportunities. The market channels are very typical PR, public relations, demand generation, partner events, and market event, et cetera, which the sales channel will be typical direct channel, government procurement, channel partners and et ceteras. We have created a very tight timeline that the first target is Q1 2026, which is right now, that we already have an optimized FHE, fully homomorphic encryption, model, which is ready for demo to various potential customers already, that we are currently doing that. We will have a private AI in the Q2, few months from now, this year, and followed by a hybrid FHE in the Q1 of next year. The AI marketplace for private AI will be there by Q2 of next year. The optimized version will be by Q3, and then culminated with an AI marketplace that is slashed between premium and a hybrid FHE by the end of 2027, the end of the next year. That is a very tight timeline that we are achieving as we speak right now for the crossover between AI and quantum safety. All of the above are kind of reflected by our Q1 result, with $350,000 of engineering revenue, and this is actually up more than 400% from last year. Most importantly, despite ramping up our marketing, investor relations, R&D, you know, et cetera, we spend less than $300,000 in the quarter and ended with a cash position of about CAD 3.3 million, which is increased by more than CAD 2.3 million from last year. We expect income starting from additional area on top of what we already produce, which I think is likely coming from the AI and other service providing. I like to take a quick pause here, reserving some times for Q&A because I think, you know, you would have a lot of questions that you would like to ask me, so I like to reserve more time for that. Again, as mentioned by Brian, I assume that everyone by now is very familiar with how to use the Q&A section with Zoom. Please do that. Brian, again, as usual, will moderate your questions. Back to you, Brian. Okay. Thank you, Andrew. Let me just gather. There's several of them here. Okay. The first one, Andrew, has to do with the $qONE token. His comment is he's on the 22.5 million $qONE tokens. He says, "How are you reflecting these on the balance sheet?" I'll take the first part, and then Andrew can elaborate on the valuation. With respect to the balance sheet, remember, these were received subsequent to the end of the quarter, so it's a subsequent event. No, they're not reflected on the Q1 balance sheet. Going forward, it'll be a matter of, we'll disclose in the notes as which follow proper IFRS and GAAP reporting. I'll turn it over to Andrew now to answer the second part of the question was, how do you feel about the value? Yeah. This is a very good question. It's also that, this is, the ink is still wet, you know, about this because as Brian mentioned, this is happening after the quarter ends. Part of the compensation was to receive a bunch of these $qONE token. We believe this token has tremendous value because it is not a meme token. It is actually the first quantum safe token in the world. Also it is the first quantum safe utility token. Like, utility token meaning that it is not just for a store of value, it has usage. Like, what the usage of $qONE token is for other people that are holding digital asset and worry about Q-Day threat to quantum protect their token. For example, if you're holding some Hyperliquid token and you're worrying about Q-Day threats, you can go to our partner site, like the Q Labs Foundation site and click a button to link your wallet to our product. Then they can quantum protect, they call quantum locking, you know, doing a quantum lock to protect the asset against Q-Day threat, and then doing quantum unlock when they want to sell or transfer or something like that. Obviously, you know, doing this kind of a protection, we will require people to pay some fees, which is very cheap. You're talking about like $0.01, $0.02 something. The business model is kind of like when you are combining so many pennies together, it becomes billion dollars of revenue. That is the kind of things that they are going after. This would also help pushing the value of $qONE token. Today, the value of the $qONE tokens is about $10 million, which is very, very good, as I said, in a bear market like that, and they are still, you know, going out with a successful ICO. The real gain is by the end of April, when we are releasing the quantum lock and unlocking process while people can protect the token and paying the quantum gas fee using this currency. Yeah, after a long-winded answer to the question, the short answer is that we are very, I would say positive, you know, on the value proposition of this $qONE token. Okay, thanks. This is a follow-on question to it, and I think it's more technology related. It, and it came in as you were talking. Can you outline the current measures being taken by crypto players, like BTC, so I assume that's Bitcoin and Ethereum, to protect from hacking and how our solution compares with timelines? Yeah. I would say that, few years ago, when we were preaching about Q-Day threat, some people don't even understand and nobody listen. Now everyone is talking about it, and they started doing something, but they are where we were about 2, 3 years ago. The kind of solution that they are all presenting, you know, are either a new layer 1 chain, which the world doesn't need another layer 1 chain, right? Or they are proposing something that would be a quantum signature, changing the signature of the fundamental blockchain technology, which also doesn't work because we went through that before, you know, 2, 3 years ago, that it is too large to fit into the existing data structure. It just won't work, right? Finally, you know, some of the proposal by, say, the original layer 1 chain or Bitcoin chain that may work, it also would take a long time because the nature of the blockchain technology, the nature of the cryptocurrency technology is an open community rather than having an owner. It is a community-owned technology, which take a long time for so many, like, thousands of smart people to come together having the same consensus in how things work, right? If you are following what Ethereum has been doing, simply changing from proof of work to proof of stake, it took them 5 years to do it. To do something like that, it would take another few years to do it, like, you know, 2029 or 2030 or something. It's definitely passing the Q-Day threshold already. I would summarize saying that it's too late, you know, while our solution is today. Whether Q-Day came in 2029, 28 or 27 or whatever, the technology is here today of what we have created for our partner, which is ready for use beginning April, about a month and a half from now. Okay, thanks. Now I'll turn it over because I've grouped these next group of questions, because they have to do with AI. Andrew, the first one is, this is in the last few presentations, you were mentioning the AI marketplace, now you're talking about small language models, SLMs. Are you switching focus? No, we're not switching focus. Basically, the AI marketplace is a marketplace for SLM. It's just that we haven't used the term SLM, which is small language model. The market for SLM, or some people calling them special purpose AI, is extremely large. The reason being is there are all kinds of different technology for specifically for different sector. The typical example I always give is, say credit card fraud detection for the credit card company, right? Or facial recognition, anomaly detection, medical advice, and all these kind of things are typical SLM, small language model market. The only difference that we were the first application we thought at the beginning was to implement the AI marketplace for these small language SLM models to be listed for their users to use. After starting our market generation activities, we found that the market is way larger than that. We have many inquiring from the like of financial sectors, government sector or something, that they want to have their own model for their own use, which is also very privacy oriented. Yeah, the market has been just expanded, you know, rather than the switching focus. It is still the same thing, only that becoming bigger. Okay. The next one is still on AI. I grouped several of these together because they're all asking pretty much the same. It's, what is your plan for sales revenue in AI? One person noticed that we talked about a use case for banks in our press release, governments and healthcare are obvious ones as well, he says. This represents a huge opportunity. Can you elaborate on 01 Quantum's go-to-market strategy for AI? Yeah. In general, I think I kind of lose a little bit in my early presentation here, that we are going after the market in several different cylinders. Like the first one was the government, and then the second one are going after enterprises. We are also running some seminar or webinars in educating the market. We have 2 executives focusing on 2 different things. One focus on the government procurement and government funding sector, and the other executive are focusing on the financial sectors. They are both, you know, addressing the same SLM, small language model, requirement by either the government sector, defense sector, or the financial sector. There's also a third front that we are working with partners. We have some really big partners that are currently in discussion with us and doing demonstration to their large enterprise customer in the areas of AI. Yeah, it's a multi-direction, attacking, you know, for the sales and marketing channel for this market. Okay. I think we got time for one more, Andrew. How are companies protecting their AI generating data, generated data now? He seems to be confused, how is our proposed solution going? Uh- Okay. Yeah, I think I understand your question is likely, that how people today are protecting their data and how we are addressing that problem. I think, you know, the answer is very simple. Today, people are not protecting their data. Simple, you know. There's no protection. Everything that is happening in the AI sectors, the AI inference, or you call it AI queries, are totally unencrypted. Everything that you ask ChatGPT, for example, or you ask your SLM, are 100% unencrypted, that the operator of the model would understand what you have asked, right? They can analyze your question. They know what you have asked. They also know the answer to that. What we have created, and is patent pending today, is encrypting the user query or the prompt, right? Encrypting the AI model so that they're encrypted before the AI inference. The answer is also encrypted back. Only the person who asked, having the private key, can decrypt the answer. The AI model vendor would have no idea although they can provide the answer, but they don't know what the user has asked, right? That's how we protect the privacy, the complete privacy of the user and also the AI model itself. Okay. Thank you, Andrew. I'm conscious of the time. There are a few open questions. For those, if you wish, please, you can contact either myself or Andrew Cheung. You can call us or email us any time for any further questions or updates. Again, thank you for attending, and I'll turn it back to Andrew for closing comments. Yeah. Thank you, Brian. In closing, I would say timing is everything. The quantum market is like AI 3 years ago, and it has a huge total addressable market. My goal is to have 01 come out as the unicorn, you know, in the PQC market, and we are very well positioned to achieve that goal. Thank you again, and I hope to see you again in our AGM, happening, I think someday in April that we will announce the date. Thank you very much again. See you later.