Thank you for joining us at JPMorgan's Annual Global Technology Media Telecommunications Conference. My name is Sagar Kapadia, and I'm an Executive Director in JPMorgan's tech investment banking team. It's my pleasure to host this fireside with Infleqtion, a leading quantum tech company specializing in quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum software. With me today is Matthew Kinsella, CEO. Matt, welcome.
Thank you, Sagar. My legal team has said I have to read a quick disclaimer. Before we begin, let me remind you that our forward-looking statements are subject to risk and uncertainties, which you can find in our SEC filings. Also, we reported our Q1 results, and we will not be providing any updates to our guidance. All right, as long as we're all set on the ground rules. Thanks so much for being here, and Sagar, great to see you.
Absolutely, Matt. Matt, why don't we start with your background? I think your background and lead-up to being a CEO of Infleqtion is different, and it's inspiring for a finance guy like me. Why don't you talk to us a little bit about your background and why you chose to become the CEO of Infleqtion?
Yeah, for sure. Well, first I'll say, Sagar is looking more chipper than usual because he's got a three-and-a-half-month-old at home, and it's the best night of sleep he's had in a long time, being in a hotel. I'll also say, it's a small but mighty group here, because we're competing with SanDisk. I will remind you all that 1 year ago today, in this very room, Sagar hosted the fireside chat with SanDisk, and that was 1,300% ago in the stock price. We've got a good precedent here. Yes, my background is a little different than most quantum CEOs. In fact, I was in these seats for many years. I was at a firm called Maverick Capital for 18 years. I was both on the hedge fund side of the business, covering technology, and then I helped start our venture capital fund in 2014.
In 2017, I got super curious about quantum, started meeting all the quantum companies that were around at that time. Ultimately found a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder named Dana Anderson, who is the pioneer of a quantum modality called neutral atoms, and everything that Infleqtion builds is based upon neutral atoms. When I met Dana, I became totally enamored with this underlying technology for many reasons, largely because it's highly flexible, and so it can be used to build things beyond just quantum computers. It's also highly scalable, and so it seemed at the time that it was a very good modality to build useful quantum computing. I seeded the business in early 2018, have been on the board ever since, and then got the really unique opportunity to join full-time as CEO just over two years ago.
We took the company public in February, and we've guided to doing at least $40 million in revenue in 2026, which makes us one of the largest by revenue quantum companies out there.
That's great, Matt. For those who are new to the Infleqtion story, maybe why don't you give you a little bit of an elevator pitch on Infleqtion. What is Infleqtion? Why should one care about Infleqtion?
Going back to the neutral atom modality, you should care about Infleqtion for two big reasons, actually, I've got a prop here. Everything we build has one of these at the heart. This is our Quantum Core. What we do is we trap millions of atoms inside these Quantum Cores, then we use lasers to take advantage of the quantum mechanical properties of those atoms and turn those quantum mechanical properties into useful products that range from quantum sensors to quantum computers. Why you should care about quantum in general, it's because those quantum mechanical properties that I referenced allow you to build products that can perform at orders of magnitude improvement over classical products. We're not talking a 50% improvement. We're talking between 10 and 1,000 to maybe 1 millionx improvement on things like timekeeping or sensing or communications.
Also, you can use those quantum mechanical properties to create what are called qubits or quantum bits, which build the basis of quantum computers, which can perform calculations that classical computers cannot perform nor will ever be able to perform. Their monetization opportunity here is absolutely immense on both the quantum sensing and the quantum computation side of things, because we can just do things that classical technologies can't do, or we can do them 10-1 million times better.
Thanks, Matt. There are multiple different quantum companies out there. What differentiates Infleqtion here?
The strategy of the business is enabled by the flexibility of the underlying quantum modality. The other quantum modalities that you might hear about, whether that's trapped ion or superconducting or photonics, really are useful for one thing, and that is to build a quantum computer. The neutral atom modality is unique because it is done at room temperature, and it's all based upon photonics. You don't require large cryogenic freezers, and you can shrink everything down. Instead of our computers having to be the size of this room, they can be the size of, call it, one of these tables, and over time, they can be much smaller. At the core of all these computers is one of these things and then a bunch of laser systems that can all be integrated down to photonic integrated circuits.
If you look at some of our sensing products, it's almost like a view into the future of what the quantum computers will look like. We sell clocks that are about the size of an Xbox, that clock used to be the size of this table, which is about the size of the quantum computers. Over time, we've been able to integrate the various components of those clocks down to something that is field deployable and hardened and much, much smaller and much, much cheaper.
The flexibility of the neutral atom modality is at the basis of our strategy, and our strategy is very different than most quantum companies because we can take this almost NVIDIA-like approach to commercialization and monetization, where we've got this very powerful neutral atom core, which we're pointing at these near-term opportunities that are here and now in the sensing world, all the while building for the crown jewel of quantum computing.
You did mention a little bit about neutral atoms, right? What gives you conviction that this will be one of the winning modalities, and what's your view on there are, of course, multiple modalities that are trying to prove fault-tolerant computing.
Yeah.
What's your view about the future? Do you think it's going to be a multi-modality sector or just the winner takes it all?
In quantum sensing, neutral atoms have already won because they are the only modality that can address that. Let's take the sensing side of the equation off the table and let's focus on the quantum computing side. Why will neutral atoms win? In many ways, neutral atoms are the new kid on the block. If you look to history, trapped ions have been being invested in since the mid-90s. Superconducting has been being invested in since the early 2000s. It really wasn't until 2011 that the first neutral atom quantum gates were shown at our Chief Scientist, Mark Saffman's lab at the University of Wisconsin. Since then, the progress that neutral atoms Well, that was just a two-qubit entanglement. Let's say since the Maverick investment in Infleqtion in 2018, the progress of neutral atoms has been absolutely astounding.
If you look at a logarithmic chart of both quality and quantity of qubits, the superconducting and the trapped ion modalities kind of look like this, and the neutral atom modality looks like this. What do you need to build a useful quantum computer? You need a lot of very high-quality qubits, and that is what neutral atoms are proving to be the winner in both of. I think the way this plays out is you see a lot of different modalities looking to get to useful quantum computing first, and the modality and the company that does that will suck a lot of the oxygen out of the room for other modalities. That won't make those other modalities go away, though.
I think you'll see a lot of activity coalesce around one modality in the near term, because that will be the one that actually can do useful things on a quantum computer. Over time, there will be a place for one or two of the other modalities. I do think at the steady state, we live in a multi-modality world, and therefore, they will need to network and integrate together. That's actually the basis of a recent DARPA program we won called DARPA HARQ, which stands for Heterogeneous Architectures. How do you take different modalities of quantum computers and make them work together via software and networking? I believe it was us and IonQ were the two companies chosen for that.
Short answer, I think one modality will win in the short term that will gather a lot of the resources, and that will compound in nature, but the other modalities will get there eventually, and then we will live in a multi-modality world. It's probably not dissimilar from the way the memory world is played out, right? You have certain types of memory, like DRAM, that are good for one thing, and then certain types of memory, like hard disk drives, that are good for something else.
Yeah. Maybe let's talk a little bit about the quantum computing market, right? You did touch a little bit on this right now, but there are companies that have reached, including you, are reaching good milestones. You are now a public company, and there are a bunch of other ones out there who've also done some funding rounds and all. How do you think this whole sector evolves, right? How do you see next three to five years? What world would we be living in for quantum computing?
Well, I think it'll largely, from a technology perspective, track what I just said. I think then you can see what are the implications of that. My guess is there will likely be, and if you look back to past technology cycles, this has certainly been the case, there'll be a wave of consolidation almost certainly in the next several years. Then there will be the to-be-eaten and the eaters, for lack of a better term. Ultimately, I think you'll see one to two companies for each of the different modalities that have gathered all of the resources and power and that likely is the way this all plays out over time.
Yeah. There's of course a lot of buzz about quantum computing, but you guys also do quantum sensing.
Yes.
I don't think people appreciate the importance of sensing, so I would like you to probably address that. Why should one care and take heed of quantum sensing today?
In many ways, the quantum sensing opportunity is easier to grasp than the quantum computing opportunity, because what we're building with quantum computers are entirely new computation capabilities that just haven't existed in classical computing. It's not like we can say quantum computers are going to do this thing that today's computers do, but better. It's going to open up this whole new class of applications that we can point compute at, and they'll work hand-in-hand with classical computers to enable those. We can get into what some of those are over time. The quantum sensing opportunity is a little bit easier to grasp because I think of it as basically a replacement cycle.
We can build clocks, we can build RF antennas, and we can build inertial sensors that perform at anywhere between 10 to 1,000 times better than the classical versions of those products. We are starting to approach similar price points to the classical versions of those products, at which point it becomes a no-brainer to swap out a classical system with a quantum system that can perform at those types of performance levels. It is a less well-understood opportunity, I think largely because there aren't many other quantum companies that have focused on it, largely due to the inability of their modality to be mapped to quantum sensing. I think it's something that Wall Street should understand a lot better, and it's a big driver of our revenue today. Historically, it's been about 2/3 of our revenue, and it's very, very rapidly growing.
We've announced some pretty insane things we're doing with quantum sensing. We are working with NASA right now, and this is a multiple tens of millions of dollars program, to put quantum gravity sensors into space. We sent the first quantum technology up into space alongside NASA in 2018. That technology has resided on the International Space Station since then. We just sent some replacement technology up on a SpaceX vehicle about one month ago, and what that was basically doing was proving that quantum worked in space. There was a human in the loop. Astronauts had to tweak the system, but that's now proven. What we're working with NASA now is to send these systems up into satellites to orbit the Earth and sense changes in gravity on the Earth's surface with extreme precision.
You can infer a lot of very important data about what's happening both on and below the Earth's surface by changes in gravity, because ultimately that's a change in mass. Gravity is a measure of mass. If someone's building something underground, or if an aquifer is being depleted, those can all be discovered based upon quantum gravity sensing. If you take that gravimeter and put it closer to the Earth's surface, you can start to identify rare minerals or oil deposits that are underneath the Earth with extreme precision relative to classical technologies. We have a multi-million-dollar contract with the U.S. Army to field deploy our clocks. Why that's important is because the root of everything we do on a daily basis is based in timing.
Everything, all of our devices have to synchronize, all of the financial markets have to synchronize, the electricity grid has to synchronize, data centers have to synchronize, military operations have to synchronize. We rely on GPS to do that synchronization. What is GPS? It's basically 30 satellites that circle the Earth that are sending a very precise timestamp down to Earth, and they synchronize with these table-sized clocks, and that's how they get their timing. It's basically like this nested doll situation where these room-sized clocks send their idea of time up to the satellites, the satellites blast it down to our phones, to our Apple Watches, et cetera. GPS is becoming increasingly prone to being spoofed or denied. The only way to maintain synchronization in a GPS-denied environment is effectively with our field-deployed quantum clocks.
That's the tailwind of the driver of what the military wants with the clocks. There's a couple of examples of the use cases for quantum sensors and what they can do. It's just that orders of magnitude better performance than classical technologies.
That's super exciting.
Yeah.
You did touch a little bit about computing and sensing, but can you talk a little bit about just the complementary nature of how sensing and computing and your software is intermingling, and how additive it is to your overall portfolio?
Yes. I'm speaking of them as though they're distinct, but one of the most important things to take away from our strategy is that the underlying tech is the same. Whether we are turning those atoms inside these cells into clocks or antenna or any of the different products that fall into that sensing bucket or into computers, it's the same photonics, it's the same atoms, the same species of atoms, the same Quantum Cores. There's immense technical leverage between everything we do. As we are getting better at building and selling clocks, or as we are working on these quantum sensors to send up into space, the technical learnings and engineering breakthroughs that we make on those directly accelerate the path to useful quantum computing.
These are all effectively just different flavors of the same thing, and you can think of them as sort of like a continuum of complexity. Some of these sensors are just less complex things you can do with neutral atoms. We are already engineering and field deploying them, and then the computers are more complex things that you can do with neutral atoms, and those are still in the R&D phase. We are taking the learnings from an engineering and systems engineering and field deployability and applying that to quantum computers. Maybe a great way to tie this all together is the United Kingdom bought six quantum computers two years ago with the goal of having a 100-qubit quantum computer in the United Kingdom.
Because of, A, the scalability of neutral atoms, but probably more importantly, B, our history of building and shipping products that actually work out in the field, we were the only company to achieve that goal. By December 31st, 2025, we had field deployed a 100-qubit quantum computer in the United Kingdom, which was the only company who was able to pull that off. Because of that, if any of you are following quantum, you've probably noticed that the United Kingdom has announced a very large GBP 2 billion investment program that is going to be staged out over the next several years that cuts across both quantum computing and quantum sensing.
In the press release announcing this massive investment opportunity or investment initiative by the U.K. government, they really only listed three companies, and we were one of them, pointing like, "Hey, these guys were successful at doing this for us in the past." I think that puts us in a good position to capture our fair share of that new investment opportunity coming from the U.K. government.
That's amazing. You guys, of course, are doing a lot right now, but can you talk a little bit about milestones in next 12 months and maybe midterm in next three to five years, what are the milestones you are aiming at?
Yeah. At the highest level, the way I think about our strategy is we have to sell what we have on the truck today, and then we've got to drive that truck to the future. Our milestones fall into those two large buckets. The first one is exceed our $40 million in revenue guidance over the next 12 months, and that'll largely come from selling more quantum sensors and selling quantum computing systems. The other milestone will be on the technical side of things and I try to boil this down into very simplistic terms. To make a quantum computer useful, you basically need 100 logical qubits, and a logical qubit is an error-corrected qubit. Once we get to 100 logical qubits, the new applications that quantum computing will enable will start to become real. Until then, quantum computing isn't really doing anything commercially useful.
Our goal is to get these things commercially useful as fast as possible. That is to get to 100 logical qubits. We're the only publicly traded quantum company to have announced any logical qubits. We announced 12 in 2025. Our goal was to have eight, and we did 12. Our goal is to have 30 logical qubits by the end of this year, and then 100 logical qubits by the end of 2028. At that 100 logical qubit level, that is when we'll start to show quantum advantage on real-world applications, probably in the material science world, meaning we can use this to build better batteries or build better jet fuels, or build better materials in general that you can build spacecraft out of, or aircraft out of, or cars out of.
Those are where you'll see the first examples of quantum advantage in quantum computing.
Interesting. While these milestones you just laid out, the technical milestones especially, this is a question that we keep getting from a lot of stakeholders.
Yeah
that where in the journey are you? Is it more a tech validation challenge.
No
You still have to prove out your tech, or it's that behind you, and now it's more of an engineering and scaling challenge?
Yeah, it's very much in the engineering world now. I knew back in 2018 that we could build a good business on the quantum sensing side of the market. It was still unclear as to when or honestly, whether quantum computing would ever work back in 2018, and really for several years after that. In 2023, the big science breakthrough happened, let's say, which was the first logical qubits were shown. Before 2023, it was unclear as to whether we would ever figure out how to get logical qubits, and until you have error-corrected logical qubits, you can have as many physical qubits as you want, but you won't be able to do anything useful with them. It has very much, in my mind, gone from an if to a when for quantum computing.
The physics challenges are indeed behind us. Now it's the systems engineering challenges of being able to control more atoms, very fine-tunely and turn those atoms into logical qubits. We are past. That is really effectively why I left Maverick to come do this full time because I'm incredibly convicted that this is happening. It'll be absolutely game-changing for the world. We're past the physics, we're into the systems engineering.
That's great. Let me just open it up to see if there's any questions from the audience, and if there is, please just wait for the microphone.
Yeah.
Thanks, Matt. Great talk.
Thanks, Charles.
Could you talk a little bit about, the NVIDIA's obviously placed a lot of emphasis on your partnership with them and obviously talked a lot about how you guys have integrated the Ising algorithm as of recent?
Yeah.
That's obviously put you guys way ahead of the pack, relative to others who have had some difficulty with that.
Yeah.
Could you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah. NVIDIA has a really strong quantum team, and they are not trying to build quantum technologies themselves internally. At the end of the day, what does NVIDIA want to do? They want to sell more GPUs. They view quantum ultimately as a way to sell more GPUs because of that whole concept of opening up the types of computation that we can apply, or types of applications we can apply computers to. Their job is basically to act as a bridge between GPUs and QPUs, what we call.
If I fast-forward into the future, I think what you'll see is just like GPUs started to layer into the data center over CPUs, you'll see QPUs start to layer into the data center on top of GPUs and CPUs, and we'll just throw workloads into the data center, and they'll get solved, and you won't care if it's quantum or not. The Ising models are very interesting because it's very much in that spirit of how do you get to useful quantum computing as fast as possible, and therefore allow for the pull-through of GPUs. I view AI/GPUs and quantum/QPUs as this virtuous cycle. I've already described how over time, when quantum computers become useful, they will work hand in hand with GPUs to solve new types of problems.
Interestingly, large language models and AI, in general, are helping us get to useful quantum computing faster, and that's kind of what's behind this whole Ising announcement. What's holding us back from getting to that is 100 logical qubits. It's not the number of qubits we have. It's not the quality of those qubits. It is the errors that are still embedded in these systems. What we need to do is what's called error correction. Identifying where the errors are happening is a quantum mechanical effort in nature, we are able to use our quantum systems to do that. Interestingly, tracing those errors back to their root cause is an inference problem, which inference is something that AI does very well.
There has been an acceleration in our ability to push error correction forward based upon our integration and our partnership with NVIDIA that has been incredibly important to accelerating us getting to useful quantum computing.
Any other questions from the audience?
Yes.
Thanks, Matt. This was alluded to a little bit earlier in terms of where the industry is going. When you think about the technology and what's out there today, do you think there's a winner-take-all situation, or there's plenty of room for this technology to work in different ways and it's complementary, ultimately, depending on the use case?
I think long term, there will be multi-modalities. If you just look to history, I'd love to say we can all win. Right now, I do think there's a rising quantum tide that is lifting all quantum boats because you just want to get to useful quantum computing. Ultimately, I think it's going to play out like other technology markets where you'll have a number one who's got the vast majority of the share. You have a number two who's got a pretty good little share. You've got a number three who's got a tiny slug, and then the rest are kind of cats and dogs. My guess is you see it play out similar to that.
Whether that is the case in quantum computing as a whole, or whether you see that play out in, let's say, two different quantum modalities, I don't yet know. I think you're going to see a lot of the profit pools go to the winners.
Let's talk a little bit about your software stack. It is pretty unique, and you've always spoken about Contextual Machine Learning, CML. Can you just explain the role that Infleqtion is playing there?
Yeah.
Maybe also just update us on the customer activity.
Sure. One of the underappreciated elements of getting to useful quantum computing is, as I just said, error correction, which is really rooted in the software. Software is absolutely critical to everything we do, but in particular, getting to useful quantum computing. As we've been writing software for quantum computers, that software is helping us get to useful quantum computing faster and run applications on those quantum computers and abstract away the weird quantumness of these systems so people can start to code in something that looks more like Python and the compiler will take care of translating that into how you shoot lasers at atoms. We're abstracting away a lot of the weird physics and making these user interfaces that allow application developers to actually start to write code.
The funny thing, though, is when you're writing software for quantum computers, you have to completely rethink it. That's because you have to code around these fundamental laws of quantum mechanics that aren't present in traditional software development. An example is there's this thing called the no-cloning theorem that is true in quantum mechanics. You cannot copy and paste quantum data. It's a very weird thing, but it's true. Copying and pasting data is incredibly prevalent in classical software development. We've had to write our software kind of working around these constraints of the quantum world. It turns out when you apply that software onto GPUs, it kind of rethinks the memory architecture of these GPUs and has some really interesting performance enhancements. We've been applying our quantum-inspired software onto GPUs and enabling quantum-like performance advantages, but before we get to useful quantum computing.
An example of this would be a program we're doing with the Army, which is called the SAPIENT program, and the acronym is Secure AI for PNT. You have all these military vehicles out in the field. It could be anything from a Humvee to a motorcycle to a tank to an aircraft carrier to a plane, and they all rely on GPS to navigate. At the same time, they have all these classical sensors on board that are ingesting immense amount of data about the world around them, and that could be video data, that could be speed data, that could be wind data. All of that data could be useful if it could actually be processed and turned into a signal. The problem is it's so much streaming data that it would overwhelm a NVIDIA Jetson chip.
What we've done, this is another element of our partnership with NVIDIA, is we've put our quantum software onto these NVIDIA Jetson chips, we've enabled this ability to ingest all of this streaming data and turn it into a fallback system for when GPS goes away. If you lose your GPS signal, you can actually start to take into account all of these real-time streaming data signals that are coming onto you and turn that into a navigation system. This has been something the Army has put a lot of wood behind the arrow on because they are terrified of GPS-denied environments because it will basically be the environment that we fight the next hot war in.
It's a really interesting use case of taking this quantum-inspired software and applying it on classical systems and enabling a real-world use case, which is very true to our strategy that I high level outlined of sell what we have on the truck today and then continue driving that truck towards the future. That is taking quantum advantage and fast-forwarding it almost to today via software.
That's great. Maybe switching gears a little bit, just on financials. How do I think about your long-term model?
Can you also just touch upon what's your strategy? M&A, versus growing organic?
High level right now, $40 million+ in revenue this year. We burned, call it $35 million in revenue or so last year, and we've said that we'll burn a bit more this year as we invest into the increasingly obvious opportunity to win quantum computing. If you were to look at those financials relative to other publicly traded companies, those stack up quite well from both a capital efficiency perspective as well as a scale perspective. Our strategy is to continue to invest in the R&D to get to useful quantum computing and continue to sell more and more quantum sensing equipment. I think that will provide us with a good growth trajectory over time, and I think you'll see the revenue composition shift from, call it historically high level, 2/3 sensing, 1/3 computing.
That will invert when computing becomes useful, then you'll probably see computing become more than 66% of revenue over time. We've sold 3 quantum computers historically, but there is a very robust opportunity to sell many more. As they get closer and closer to that magic 100 logical qubit level, that opportunity set will grow even more. Long term, this should be a very profitable endeavor. If we can enable types of computation that are not possible other ways, we'll have enormous pricing power, and so I would imagine the gross margins would be very high over time for our quantum computers. Think of your decent 50%-60% gross margins for our quantum sensors. Ultimately, we are not generating profit now, but very much my intent is to make a very cash flow generative business.
That's helpful. If you can also touch upon M&A.
Oh, right. Yeah. Having been an investor in both the public and private markets for a long time, I go into M&A with a high degree of, skepticism is not the right word, but the bar is high because integration of these new businesses into our business are not the easiest thing to do. The road is strewn with the bodies of failed acquisition integrations. That said, the kinds that can work are technology, not even tuck-ins, but technology-rooted acquisitions that directly accelerate your existing roadmap. I think we will look for those. Part of the reason to go public, the main reason was to raise the $550 million that we did. The other is to have a liquid currency and to make those types of technology tuck-ins that can directly accelerate our roadmap. It's infinitely easier to do with a liquid currency.
I think if you see us doing anything, it would be enabling technology that allows us to either get to useful quantum computing faster or to solidify our leadership position in one of the sensing markets.
Yeah. Just very briefly, you recently just announced Q1. Can you just provide very brief overview on the demand that you are seeing on sensing and computing side?
This quarter or Q1, we did $9.5 million in revenue. We burned about $8 million or $9 million in the quarter. We are seeing, I'd say probably even more so than history, a more balanced demand environment across both computing and sensing. That's not saying we're going to see a 50/50 split in revenue, but it is clear that the quantum computing opportunities are indeed growing as people are looking to buy these systems to either, A, own the real estate that we can upgrade to get commercially useful, or B, train their workforce on how to utilize quantum systems so they are ready when they do indeed get powerful enough to be useful.
Very helpful. I know we are almost on time, but if to end with.
Yeah
What are the top three takeaways or highlights that you want the investors or audience to go away with?
Number one is that quantum is going to be a very big force in our world in the next several years. Just be aware of that, and it will manifest itself in many different ways. I don't think it's going to be like the ChatGPT moment we all had in late 2022 where you now are interacting with almost a Turing complete model, but it'll start to layer itself in, and we'll start to see things happen that couldn't have happened before. That'd be one, just quantum is going to be a big thing. It's worth paying attention to. Number two is that you should pay attention to both quantum sensing and quantum computing. I think quantum sensing, to the extent quantum is understood in the market, quantum computing is much better understood than quantum sensing.
Number three, I think the neutral atom modality and Infleqtion in particular is uniquely suited to win for both of those markets. There's three takeaways, self-serving takeaways, but those are the takeaways.
Perfect. Thank you so much, Matt.
Thank you, Sagar.
This was great.
Yeah.
Appreciate this.
Thanks, everybody.
Thank you.