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The explosive move in Rigetti Computing’s (RGTI) stock has its CEO cautioning investors that it will take time for the company to post sustainable sales growth and profits.
“Particularly because of the hype that is going on in the quantum computing space and some erroneous statements are being made, including by people in the industry, we have to tamp down some expectations,” Rigetti Computing CEO Subodh Kulkarni told me on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid podcast (video above; listen in below).
Kulkarni talked to Yahoo Finance after attending a New York City conference at investment bank Needham on Tuesday.
“So I have to tell [investors] that it’s still not the time to talk about sales and sales growth because we are still very much in the technology development mode. We have to get the technology perfected before we can start seeing real material difference in sales,” explained Kulkarni, who is an engineer by training.
The comments follow a feverish series of movements in quantum computing stocks, which have attracted momentum traders in recent months amid AI hype.
On Tuesday, shares of Rigetti Computing (RGTI) gained 48% in a day, while D-Wave Quantum (QBTS) rose almost 23% and Quantum Computing (QUBT) jumped nearly 14%.
The stocks had fallen the day prior after Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the Joe Rogan podcast that “very useful” quantum computing is likely a “decade-plus out.” Zuck’s comments echoed bearish ones made by Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang at CES last week.
Those big-name naysayers haven’t gotten to Kulkarni, who has witnessed his company’s stock price surge more than 777% in the past year. The company’s market cap is now above $2 billion, and its ticker page has been among the most active on Yahoo Finance in recent months.
The problem, however, is that Rigetti has never been profitable from its quantum chipmaking efforts. It lost $45 million on a net basis through the third quarter of last year. Moreover, Rigetti noted in a recent filing it may need more cash by the second quarter of 2026 to fund its chipmaking ambitions.
Read more: why the Nvidia sell-off is overdone
Kulkarni pushed back on the company needing to raise more cash.
“We’ll always look at what we could potentially do. And so we never want to say we won’t do something, because things could change. But as of today, we don’t need to raise more money for the foreseeable future,” Kulkarni said.
But he acknowledged the road to profitability will be long.
“We are in the investment mode right now. We do have some sales, but that’s mostly government contract kind of opportunities,” he said.
“Assuming the timeline I described earlier holds and we start seeing material sales opportunities three to five years from now, we certainly expect the company to start becoming cash flow break-even around that time period and beyond that, profitability will come along.”
Despite the uncertain profit outlook, Wall Street continues to pile on the bullishness enveloping the sector.
“In aggregate, we believe that despite recent well publicized CEO views on an elongated path to commercialization, a slew of recent and, in some cases materially under-appreciated data points, offer broadly encouraging technical advances to significantly boost confidence in quantum’s intermediate to long-term high-value workload scalability into areas unreachable to classic CPU and GPU computing, raising the arc of our bullish sector thesis in the years ahead,” said B. Riley analyst Craig Ellis in a note this week.
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn. Tips on deals, mergers, activist situations, or anything else? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
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