Berkeley-based Rigetti's stock fell as much as 11% during its second day of trading on the Nasdaq before slightly inching back up on Thursday, bringing its stock down nearly 13% from its opening price of $9.75 on Wednesday when the Berkeley company debuted publicly after merging with blank check company Supernova.
Rigetti publicly debuted on Wednesday (Nasdaq: RGTI) after an SPAC merger that valued the nine-year-old quantum processing company at more than $1 billion and infused it with close to $270 million in cash.
Rigetti’s SPAC partner priced its warrants at $11.50 a share when it went public in an IPO last year. On Wednesday, its common stock opened at $9.75, and by market close the stock was trading down around 8% at $9.43 a share.
By midday on Thursday, its stock was hovering at about $8.70 per share, down another 7.5% from its closing price on Wednesday.
Rigetti announced its plans in October to merge with Supernova Partners Acquisition Co. II. At that time, the companies said the deal would bring in $458 million in cash and investments, before redemptions, at a $1.5 billion valuation. On Wednesday Rigetti said the deal proceeded as expected and that the timing was not influenced by broader economic concerns, though it only brought in about $261 million, almost $200 million less than it had anticipated.
"We're really excited about the transaction," CEO Chad Rigetti said. "We're really excited to take Rigetti public and embark on the next chapter in our journey, our mission to bring quantum to a broad commercial market as a public company."
Supernova's shareholders approved the merger on Monday and the new company, now Rigetti Computing Inc., started trading on the Nasdaq under the tickers RGTI and RGTIW, for common stock and warrants, respectively, according to a press release.
Chad Rigetti founded the company in 2013 to build the world's first commercial quantum computer and went through Y Combinator's accelerator in 2014.
"We are a leader in quantum computing, we have been for some time. And this is an opportunity, in going public, to accelerate our leadership in the industry. The technology is so important and the opportunity so substantial, there's going to be a lot of competition," Rigetti said. "We feel very, very well positioned" to continue leading the industry and accelerating development.
The quantum computing industry is estimated to be worth $9 billion by 2030, and large institutional players are also pouring money into research. Google, IBM and Intel all have quantum research teams.
Google said it had achieved quantum supremacy — a theoretical point when quantum processors can outperform classic supercomputers — during a 2019 experiment.
And IBM has said that it will make a 127 qubit processor available for customers in 2023, at which point it is also aiming to develop a 1,000 qubit processor.
Rigetti has set an even more ambitious timeline. It currently offers 80 qubits of processing power and is still on track to reach 4,000 qubits by 2026, Chad Rigetti said.
To achieve this, the company is designing and producing a multichip quantum computing processor that makes the technology scalable and, thus, commercially viable. And it has been offering cloud-based quantum processing to its early partners since 2017.
From 2018 to 2021, it had $40 million worth of contracts from customers, Rigetti told me, and in just the first nine months of 2021, it brought in $6.9 million in revenue.
"We are growing our revenue footprint, we are growing our customer base," he said. "These are early adopters that are really working with us to get ready for the moment where they are adding production value."
The company has 160 employees and will continue to hire this year across its teams for hardware, software, algorithms and business development.
