Earnings call transcript: Horizon Quantum’s strategic focus in Q1 2026

Horizon Quantum Holdings Ltd (HQHM) reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2026, marking its debut earnings as a public company following its merger with dMY Squared Technology Group. The company reported a net loss of $3.6 million, or $0.09 per share, showing a 25% improvement from the previous year’s loss of $0.12 per share. Despite a 1.86% drop in the last trading session, the stock showed a slight premarket uptick of 0.39%, reaching $10.25. With a market capitalization of $527 million, InvestingPro analysis indicates the stock is currently overvalued relative to its Fair Value estimate, placing it among companies on the Most Overvalued list.

Horizon Quantum’s performance in Q1 2026 reflects its transition into a public company and its strategic investments in expanding its workforce and infrastructure. The company reported a 38% increase in operating expenses, primarily driven by headcount expansion. Despite these costs, the net loss per share improved, aided by non-cash gains from warrant liability remeasurement. Over the last twelve months ending Q4 2025, the company posted a diluted loss of $1.12 per share on minimal revenue of just $40,000, representing a revenue decline of 86% year-over-year.

Horizon Quantum aims to maintain fiscal discipline while leveraging its strong cash position to support its capital-light model. The company plans to initiate revenue generation once the quantum industry achieves quantum advantage, transitioning early access users to paying customers.

CFO Greg Gould emphasized the company’s strategic hiring and fiscal discipline, stating, "The bulk of the hiring has already occurred, with a slight increase and then a leveling off expected going forward." CEO Dr. Joe Fitzsimons highlighted the significance of their software developments, noting that Beryllium represents "a key milestone" in quantum computing software.

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the company’s timeline for achieving revenue generation and the strategic importance of its partnerships. Management reiterated its focus on fiscal discipline and the long-term potential of its software and hardware strategy.

Raziel, Conference Call Operator: Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Horizon Quantum First Quarter 2026 Report Conference Call and Webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, please press star one one on your telephone.

You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please note that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker, Katherine Bailon. Please go ahead.

Katherine Bailon, Vice President of Investor Relations, Horizon Quantum Holdings Ltd: Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for joining us on Horizon Quantum’s first quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call. My name is Katherine Bailon, and I am Vice President of Investor Relations at Horizon Quantum. Joining me on today’s call are Dr Joe Fitzsimons, our Founder and CEO, and Greg Gould, our Chief Financial Officer.

Before the market opened today, Horizon Quantum issued a press release with results for its first quarter ended March 31st, 2026. You can access a copy of the release in the Investor Relations section of our website at horizonquantum.com. Today’s call is being broadcast live over the web and can also be accessed through the Investor Relations section of the Horizon Quantum website.

Before we get started, I’d like to caution you that any non-historic statements that I or the management team make during this call will constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of U.S. Federal securities law, including the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

You are cautioned that these statements involve material risks and uncertainties, including the risks Horizon Quantum has identified in its most recent annual report on Form 20-F and other filings with the SEC, and that we typically cite in our press releases that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated.

Except as required by law, Horizon Quantum expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial or product pipeline projections or other forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise.

These statements made on this conference call contain time-sensitive information and are accurate to the best of Horizon Quantum’s knowledge only as of the date they are made today, May 5th, 2026. This discussion includes non-GAAP financial measures. These measures are calculated by management and do not have any standardized meanings under U.S. GAAP.

These non-GAAP measures supplement GAAP measures but should not be viewed as substitutes for GAAP measures. We have included a reconciliation of GAAP measures to non-GAAP measures as a table at the end of our earnings press release issued this morning. With that, I will now turn it over to Horizon Quantum Founder and CEO, Dr Joe Fitzsimons.

Dr. Joe Fitzsimons, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Horizon Quantum Holdings Ltd: Thank you, Katherine. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us on the earnings call today. On the call, I’d like to highlight five key points. The first one is that we have grown our head count rapidly from a year ago, with a few more additions in the current quarter. We believe we’ll be staffed to execute on our roadmap.

Secondly, in the March quarter, we deepened two hardware partnerships. We expect to continue to add and deepen other hardware relationships in future. Third, in our software stack, we’ve made progress moving upwards in abstraction with our language, Beryllium, expanding its feature set and improving stability.

Combined with our other languages and tools, we expect Beryllium to make it easier for developers to create quantum applications to tackle real-world problems. Fourth, with our software stack, we are also tightening integration with quantum hardware, which we believe is critical to enabling quantum advantage.

Fifth, we are grateful to our few partners and our public shareholders who have provided us with enough capital for the foreseeable future to blaze a path as a public quantum software company.

But before we get into detail on the quarter, as this is our first earnings call as a public company, I wanna take a few minutes to discuss how we think about quantum computing at Horizon Quantum and why we believe we are well-positioned to grow as the quantum computing industry evolves and pushes towards quantum advantage.

I’ll then walk you through our R&D and business highlights for the quarter, before handing you over to our Chief Financial Officer, Greg Gould, to update you on the quarterly finances. In my view, the promise of quantum computers is to be better computers. They are, after all, computers with an extra trick.

They have the ability to harness interference between different computational branches, and that makes them unique. The reason I first got into quantum computing because I believed that there was a chance that quantum computing might mirror the trajectory of conventional computing. 22 years on, I believe that more strongly than ever. This historical perspective informs our approach to harnessing quantum computers to do real work.

Make no mistake, beyond press releases, beyond proof of concept experiments, it’s of paramount importance that the quantum industry reach a point where software running on quantum computers is producing results that create real value. That’s why our mission is to unlock broad quantum advantage by building the software infrastructure to solve the world’s toughest computational problems.

Today, the process of creating programs that harness quantum processing is laborious, and it requires formulating algorithms to take advantage of quantum computing’s peculiar ability to extract information from multiple possible branches of a computation through quantum interference.

The industry has largely settled on three approaches to this problem. The first is what you might call an education approach, where the hope is that developers can be taught enough about how quantum computing works that they will be able to formulate their own quantum algorithms.

While some beautiful educational material has been produced, which has been very helpful in attracting students into the field, the reality is that much of the progress in quantum computing algorithms is still made by people with many years experience. The second approach is based on libraries, where pre-written quantum programs are called to accomplish particular tasks, with these calls stitched together with classical compute.

This approach works perfectly well when what you want to do is already available through one of the growing number of quantum libraries. It falls short if no library addresses your particular problem or if customization is needed. It also missed out on the opportunity for compounding speed ups that are possible when such primitives are combined as part of a larger quantum program rather than accessed as classical program.

Sorry, excuse me, rather than accessed in a classical program in a kind of black box manner. The final approach is based on professional services. This makes sense for a small number of high value use cases, but given the rarity of quantum algorithms expertise and the amount of work necessary to tackle each new problem, relying on this approach will likely substantially limit the rate of uptake of quantum computing.

At Horizon Quantum, we’re pioneering a new approach to this problem, viewing the creation of quantum algorithms as a compilation task rather than as an R&D project. Our long-term goal is to bridge the ga