IONQ, RGTI, QUBT, and QBTS have raised a total of ~$4.5 billion this year as the battle for commercialization heats up.
Make hay while the sun is shining, or so the saying goes. And that’s exactly what America’s quantum computing companies have been doing in 2025.
Revenues have been overrated and profits unnecessary, with quantum stocks on fire this year as investors have piled into speculative pockets of the market, helping QBTS and RGTI soar some 1,800% and 2,300%, respectively, in the past year.
Still a young, largely speculative technology, quantum stocks have swung dramatically (but mostly up) on the slightest shift in sentiment. Sometimes, there’s been an actual technological breakthrough. At other moments, rumors of a potential government endorsement, contract, or investment have been enough to send them spiking — and occasionally, good old-fashioned thin air has kept them moving higher as retail traders piled into the stocks.
For the companies themselves, a higher share price is nice, but it really has zero effect on the day-to-day operations of the firm — unless they choose to cash in by selling new shares to the public. And cash in they have, with the four main public pure-play firms — D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti, Quantum Computing, and IonQ — raising more than $4.5 billion through some form of equity offering over the past year, per their press releases, including the following:
Indeed, with the exception of Rigetti Computing, which has raised the least of its peers during the past year, three out of the four quantum companies all reported a record-high cash pile in the latest quarter, giving them ample war chests to invest in the nascent technology in the pursuit of “commercialization” — or finally making some serious cash from all of these expensive hyperspeed computers, which promise the potential for breakthroughs in all kinds of fields, from engineering to biology, finance to cryptography.
At the end of Q3, D-Wave’s $836 million cash hoard outstripped that of all of its pure-play peers combined. IonQ’s fresh massive influx in early Q4 is now poised to give that company more than all its rivals combined!
Despite the hype, revenues remain negligible. Just this week, D-Wave Quantum reported revenue of just $3.7 million, with operating expenses of more than $30 million. Funding that kind of cash burn, when your operating expenses are 8x your revenue, gets a lot easier when your stock is up 1,800% in the last 12 months and you can build yourself a fortress of a balance sheet to help you weather the leaner times.
Interestingly, the race between (and beyond) the four pure-play quantum companies for commercialization — specifically to scale up hardware while solving reliability issues — is more of a battle between the different methods to achieve this common goal, whether it be using photonic (QUBT), trapped-ion (IONQ), or superconducting (RGTI, QBTS) modalities. The group is also divided in terms of the type of quantum system they’re most specialized in, with D-Wave the sole firm that’s most advanced in annealing quantum, while the others favor gate-based approaches.
Thanks to the insane ride over the last 12 months, each of those approaches should have hundreds of millions of dollars of funding available to them — even if the stock prices fade (which they have done in recent weeks).
