Quantum News Nexus

Rigetti Computing announced it has received purchase orders totaling about $5.7 million for two of its 9-qubit Novera QPUs, and while that doesn’t sound like a huge deal, it’s not exactly a small deal either, especially for this particular quantum player.

Quantum computing companies selling things they make and getting money in return is what we’re all here for, right?

This isn’t the first sale of a Novera QPU. Fermilab bought one, and so did Horizon Quantum, among others. The latest orders come almost two years after Rigetti launched the Novera as a way to put a not-terribly-expensive QPU in the hands of large research labs, universities, and others who may or may not have their own dilution refrigerators and other gear to support the superconducting QPU. 

In that sense you can buy the Novera QPU as a full meal deal or just the sandwich, though in this case the sandwich costs around $1 million (or it did a couple of years ago). Novera is based on Rigetti’s Ankaa-class architecture, featuring a square lattice of qubits and tunable couplers for high fidelity two-qubit operations. You can get it with a compatible fridge to keep your qubits properly chilled and vacuum-sealed, and also can use Rigetti’s control systems to control, calibrate, and read out the qubit states.

In addition creating something more appealing to the R&D market, the Novera QPU offering also could have been read as an admission that full-scale quantum computing systems with hundreds of qubits and costing millions of dollars more than small-scale QPU were maybe something the market wasn’t ready for.

It was really a survival move for Rigetti, which was started by Chad Rigetti in 2013 with great ambition to build superconducting quantum computers and the world’s first dedicated quantum chip fab. By late 2022, after a controversial SPAC deal to go public produced a less-than-hoped-for windfall, the founder was gone from the company that still bears his name, and layoffs followed. Since then, Rigetti has strung together quarters of light revenue from government contracts, the occasional QPU sale, and other engagements, while continuing to lose money. On the bright side, a bet by CEO Suboh Kulkarni, Chad Rigetti’s replacement, to focus the company on improving and showcasing fidelity, rather than qubits, looks to have been the right move as the market has shifted its attention away from qubit-counting and toward hybrid quantum-classical projects and error correction.

Still, while a company like IonQ has watched its revenue steadily climb, Rigetti posted $1.8 million in sales back in the second quarter of this year, a drop from the same period a year earlier. It also posted a $40 million loss. Yet, it went along for the ride when quantum stocks soared recently, hitting around $31 per share last week after starting 2025 in single digits.

Along with that came a lot of observations that the stock was greatly overvalued, and it’s hard to argue otherwise. With sporadic chip sales, and superconducting quantum machines having a longer roadmap to practicality, Rigetti still faces tough odds. Over the last few years, Kulkarni has had frequent updates essentially forecasting how long the company can go on like this with the cash it has on hand, though it has continued to find more funding. It recently raised $350 million to put its total cash-on-hand at more than $571 million as of June 30, which should extend its runway, but it already has been traveling down the same runway for 12 years without exactly taking off.

(Ed. note: A clarification here: I failed to include the total cash figure in my original version. Rigetti’s operational expenses have been increasing, though only incrementally to around $20 million in the second quarter of this year, suggesting its cash will last for a good, long while. Still, it remains unclear 1) If R&D expenses will increase at a higher rate, and 2) If some of that cash will be spent on an acquisition–Kulkarni suggested the company is more focused on R&D than M&A right now, but we’ll see if that holds true. Rigetti’s next earnings report is in November.)

Back to the two purchase orders just announced: The company said both systems are expected to be delivered to their buyers in the first half of 2026. One of the sales is to “an Asian technology manufacturing company,” according to Rigetti. “The system will serve as a testbed to develop internal quantum computing expertise. They also plan to benchmark and validate their own quantum computing technologies with the Novera system.”

The other system is destined for “a California-based applied physics and artificial intelligence startup,” Rigetti said. “The system will be used for quantum hardware and error correction research.” A lot of what the Novera is being used for sounds like it’s filling short-term needs.

However, Rigetti added that both systems are upgradeable, allowing the customers to increase the system qubit count for more complex computations and research. 

“The Novera QPU continues to be chosen and trusted by national labs and researchers across the world to advance quantum computing technology R&D,” Kulkarni said. “We are excited to see the increased demand for on-premises quantum computing systems as the industry matures.”

There have been signs that the quantum computing market is maturing faster than many people thought it would just a couple of years ago. Companies are hitting milestones, bringing in healthy revenue, raising more funding, and outlining roadmaps that don’t seem to pie-in-the-sky. We’ll see over the next year or so if it’s maturing fast enough for Rigetti to continue to survive, and perhaps even thrive.

Image: The Rigetti Computing Novera QPU in Horizon Quantum’s office. (Source: Horizon Quantum)

Quantum News Nexus is a new site from freelance writer and editor Dan O’Shea that covers quantum computing, quantum sensing, quantum networking, quantum-safe security, and more. You can find him on X @QuantumNewsGuy and doshea14@gmail.com.