Earnings call transcript: Infleqtion’s Q1 2026 revenue grows 14% YoY

Infleqtion Inc. reported a 14% year-over-year increase in revenue for Q1 2026, reaching $9.5 million, driven entirely by its quantum solutions. Despite this growth, the company faced a significant operating loss of $33.6 million, attributed to stock-based compensation and go-public transaction expenses. The stock experienced a premarket rise of 2.21% to $10.865, following a prior close at $10.63. The modest premarket gain comes after a challenging period, with the stock down 20% over the past week and posting a year-to-date decline of 32%, according to InvestingPro data. The company maintains a strong cash position with $569 million in cash and no debt, providing a solid foundation for future strategic initiatives.

Infleqtion’s Q1 2026 marked a record quarter for revenue, entirely generated from quantum solutions without contributions from legacy businesses. The company’s growth trajectory aligns with its strategic investments in innovation and expansion into new markets. However, the increased operating loss reflects the costs associated with its go-public transaction and elevated operating expenses.

Infleqtion updated its revenue outlook for 2026 to at least $40 million, indicating an acceleration in growth for the remainder of the year. The company plans to strategically deploy capital across R&D and go-to-market initiatives while maintaining a low cash burn relative to peers. The target of achieving 30 logical qubits in 2026 remains unchanged.

CEO Matt Kinsella highlighted the company’s progress in quantum computing, noting, "Our advancements in logical qubits and partnerships with leading institutions position us strongly for future growth." CFO Ilan Hart emphasized financial discipline, stating, "With a robust cash position, we are well-equipped to execute our strategic initiatives without external financing."

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the impact of strategic expenses on future profitability and the company’s approach to managing cash burn. Executives reassured that current investments are critical for long-term growth and that cash burn is being managed strategically to support key initiatives.

Marcus Kupferschmidt, Head of Investor Relations and Strategic Finance, Infleqtion: Good afternoon, and welcome to Infleqtion’s first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Marcus Kupferschmidt, head of Investor Relations and Strategic Finance. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that this conference call may include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to various risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially.

These factors are detailed in our Form 8-K and other filings with the SEC, which are available on our website at ir.infleqtion.com. We undertake no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. During today’s call, we will also reference certain non-GAAP measures. We use these measures because we believe they provide additional insight into the underlying operational performance of the business. This non-GAAP financial information should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for GAAP results.

Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP measures can be found in today’s press release and in our SEC filings. Joining me today are Matt Kinsella, our Chief Executive Officer; Ilan Hart, our Chief Financial Officer; and Pranav Gokhale, our Chief Technology Officer and General Manager of our Quantum Computing business. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. As a reminder, a replay of this call will be posted on our IR website, along with our Form 8-K and presentation materials. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Matt Kinsella, our Chief Executive Officer.

Matt Kinsella, Chief Executive Officer, Infleqtion: Thank you, Marcus, and good afternoon, everyone. We are glad you could join us for our first quarter 2026 earnings call. We appreciate your time today and your interest in Infleqtion. As I’ve said in the past, we’re really excited to work with all of you over the coming years and hopefully decades to continue to build a deeper understanding of Infleqtion, our platform, and the opportunity ahead. Similar to our last earnings call, we will open up with a brief reminder of who we are and what we’re building at Infleqtion, and we’ll talk through our strategy. This will be shorter than last time, and then we’ll walk through our Q1 results, and then we’ll take your questions.

If you’d like to deeper dive on our products, our roadmap, our markets, a replay of our March 11th Analyst Day is available in the investor section of our website. It’s a great resource as you’re learning more about quantum and Infleqtion. All right, let’s dive in. For those of you that are joining for the first time, Infleqtion is a quantum technology company with a highly differentiated platform approach. We’re building solutions across computing, sensing, and timing that are all tied together with software.

That breadth is enabled by neutral atoms, a highly flexible quantum modality that operates at room temperature and supports products we’re already deploying in real-world environments. Critical to our strategy is that the underlying components, the physics, photonics, engineering, and software are the same across all our products, all based on one platform.

That gives us a highly leveraged and efficient operating model. If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this first section, it’s the single neutral atom platform, multiple products, and many end market opportunities. We’re the only company in the quantum industry with this single platform approach. In many ways, we are following a path similar to NVIDIA, and just as they pointed their core GPU at the gaming, the crypto mining, the physics markets, while building toward the crown jewel of large language models, we are pointing our neutral atom core at these near-term markets where we have quantum advantage today, like timekeeping and sensing, while building toward fault-tolerant quantum computing, our crown jewel. Excitingly, neutral atoms are now leading on many of the metrics that matter most, and the path to commercially useful quantum computing is getting shorter.

If I had to boil Q1 down to a single word, it would be momentum. We saw momentum across all elements of our business, from technical progress, increased customer activity, new quantum-based government investments, and industry interest in neutral atoms. An interesting proof point is our neutral atom quantum core business. Since our founding, Infleqtion has supplied our neutral atom quantum cores to other neutral atom quantum companies and resource organizations. It’s a relatively small but important part of our business, and in Q1, we had our best quarter ever in our quantum cores business, which we see as a strong signal that neutral atoms are continuing to grow within the industry. Government investment is also building, with the U.K. committing up to GBP 2 billion to quantum, which I’ll discuss later in the presentation. We strongly believe neutral atoms are the best modality for the quantum era.

I was the first investor in Infleqtion back in 2018 in my prior role. When I first invested, neutral atoms were not as widely understood as other quantum modalities. What stood out to me then, is even more relevant today, is that neutral atoms offer a highly scalable architecture, attractive system economics, and are flexible to build products across sensing and computing, such that we are already shipping deployable systems and have been for many years. Nature gives us the qubits in the form of atoms. Our job is to industrialize the system around them using lasers, photonics, software, and system engineering. This is our product portfolio. All of our products are built on the same neutral atom technology platform. At the center of each system is a quantum core where neutral atoms are controlled with lasers.

Because this is one platform, progress in one area strengthens the entire portfolio. Advances in atom control, photonics software, and systems engineering benefit all of our products, from atomic clocks to quantum computers. As we get better at building and shipping clocks, that directly accelerates our path to useful quantum computing. We are also seeing the platform strategy show up commercially.

Customers often start with one capability, such as timekeeping or software, and then expand into additional products as their needs grow. That is the Infleqtion model, one scalable quantum platform supporting multiple products and markets. Because of the flexibility of this technology and the fact that we have been field deploying it for years, we are the first quantum company to operate quantum technology under the sea, in space, and to fly it in the air.

Under the sea, we demonstrated Tiqker, our optical atomic clock, on the Royal Navy’s Excalibur autonomous submarine. In space, we launched NASA’s Cold Atom Lab on the International Space Station back in 2018, we recently delivered an upgrade to the ISS about a month ago. Excitingly, we are returning to space with NASA JPL’s Quantum Gravity Gradiometer Pathfinder mission, or QGG for short. In the air, our quantum navigation technology has been tested in flight with QinetiQ on a jet. On the ground, we recently showcased quantum timing across a live fiber between Indiana and Illinois, showing a 40x, yes, that is 40x improvement over GPS timing. Precision timing is increasingly important for AI infrastructure in distributed computing environments where synchronization is critical.

Simply put, if you can synchronize distributed workloads more precisely in data centers, you can get more performance out of your underlying data center infrastructure. This slide highlights a few of the key milestones we achieved across the business.

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