Quantum News Nexus

Hello, again. After quite a few days away tied up on some other projects, I’m back, and there is a lot to go over:

Infleqtion’s first quarterly earnings report as a public company is on the calendar for May 14, but the day before that the Louisville, Colorado, firm made a pretty big quantum sensing announcement. Infleqtion unveiled Quantum Spectrum, a new RF sensing platform that brings better sensitivity, security, reliability than traditional RF sensing and GPS, both of which can be easily spoofed or otherwise met with access denial in some environments.

The platform uses “Rydberg atoms as the sensing medium, replacing conventional RF front ends with atom-based detection that tunes continuously from hertz to terahertz across the full RF spectrum in a single aperture,” according to a press release. “The result is broader spectrum awareness, earlier detection, and more resilient operation in contested environments where conventional systems are increasingly strained.” 

Defense and military outfits have been very interested in quantum-based RF sensing in the early going, and Infleqtion said it already has field programs in the US, UK, and Australia developing atom-based RF sensing for operational defense deployment. In the US, that includes a collaboration with the U.S. Army’s DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory (ARL) under the Robust, Integrated Quantum Electromagnetic Receiver (RIQER) project. From the release: “Infleqtion and ARL are designing and fielding a transportable quantum RF demonstration system based on Rydberg atom–based sensing. The system will serve as a mobile test bed for evaluating the utility of quantum RF receivers for Army mission needs, including positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), spectrum monitoring, and operation in jammed or GPS-denied environments.”

Photonic, Inc., a Canadian company that has been involved in government-led quantum benchmarking initiatives in both the US and Canada, announced final closing on funding of more than $200 million USD ($275M CAD) in investment. 

This round was first announced back in January at $130 million USD ($180M CAD). The final tally now gives Photonic a $2 billion USD ($2.7B CAD) post-money valuation and more than $350 million USD ($475M CAD) in total capital, was led by UK-based Planet First Partners. The round also included new investors Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Export Development Canada (EDC), Bell Ventures, Firgun Ventures, InBC Investment Corp. and existing investor Mubadala Capital.

A few things worth noting about that list: Firgun has invested in multiple quantum companies, including Quantum Motion (see more in the next item about that) and Quantum Elements, and was a very early investor in Cambridge Quantum Computing, which later via merger morphed into Quantinuum. Planet First’s other notable quantum investment was in Riverlane, while Bell Ventures is the venture arm of Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE). That gives Photonic two big Canadian telecom backers, as it previously announced TELUS as a participant in this round. Microsoft also is a backer.

Quantum Motion also announced a big funding round a few days before Photonic. The UK company’s $160 million USDSeries C round co-led by DCVC and Kembara, with participation from new investors, the British Business Bank and, yes Firgun, alongside existing investors. Quantum Motion boasts a silicon transistor-based approach to quantum computing, and has been among Nvidia’s growing list of quantum partners.

Next, guess what? More funding. Nvision, a company that mostly has been known for quantum sensing for use in medical imaging (probably the first firm I heard about in connection with quantum MRIs), raised $55 million in a Series B round led by healthcare diagnostics giant Abbott. The round includes a $17 million loan from the European Investment Bank, and other investors participating include Playground Global, Matterwave/b2ventures, Entrée Capital, and others. The new funding brings NVision’s total capital raised to $120 million.

The company also announced a big strategic move, expanding from quantum sensing into quantum computing, advancing its efforts “to build an end-to-end, quantum based approach to designing and validating therapies,” a press release stated. 

Its new quantum computing platform is called Photonic Integrated Quantum Circuits (PIQc, or Pixie, if you insist on everything being cute). It’s based on an architecture whose core is built on single photon emitting organic molecules that Nvision said form “an entirely new class of qubits, fundamentally different from legacy approaches… The new qubits are now being integrated as a thin organic layer directly onto photonic chips, creating the basis for PIQc, the company’s press release stated. “By combining this molecular layer with established photonic hardware, the approach enables a scalable path to building quantum computers using standard semiconductor manufacturing technologies.” Nvision said it discovered the new class of qubits while developing its MRI signal enhancement technology for its Polaris sensing platform.

And now, some earnings news. While we await Infleqtion’s report, three other quantum firms have reported first quarter earnings recently:

Quantum Computing, Inc. (QCi) posted almost $3.7 million in revenue for its first quarter 2026 earnings, up from just around $39 million a year earlier. That sounds like quite a feat, though it should be noted that a lot of that–all but about $204,000–was due to recent acquisitions, including its absorption of the Luminar photonic components business and the more recent, much smaller deal to buy quantum communications firm NuCrypt. 

QCi has about $1.4 billion cash on hand, and is in for an interesting rest of 2026, as that Luminar deal is expected to deliver as much as $25 million in revenue, while the company also continue to explore options for a fab expansion.

Rigetti Computing also just reported a first quarter revenue jump, from $1.5 million in Q1 2025 to $4.4 million this year, though the surge mostly was fueled by actual product sales, including the Novera QPU. Rigetti has almost $570 million in cash and cash equivalents, and has really showed some discipline in sticking to an organic growth strategy even as some observers have continued to suggest it should eye small-scale acquisitions. The company also finally launched its Cepheus-1-108Q, which had been delayed. That system is due to be delivered to a customer in India later this year.

D-Wave Quantum in its own first quarter earnings report boasted of $33 million in bookings, a year-over-year jump of almost 2000%. It did not boast as much about first quarter revenue of $2.9 million, which represented a sharp decline from Q1 2025 mark of $15 million. But, last year’s Q1 numbers were inflated by a full system sale, while this year’s numbers are more typical of D-Wave’s quarterly take.

Quantum News Nexus is a 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.