D-Wave Quantum Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Quartr
Provided by Quartr
March 13, 2025

There are 9 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to D Wave's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year twenty twenty four Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Kevin Hunt of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Thank you and good morning. With me today are Doctor. Alan Barrett, our Chief Executive Officer and John Markovich, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward looking statements and should be considered in conjunction with cautionary statements contained in our earnings release and the company's most recent periodic SEC report. During today's call, management will provide certain information that will constitute non GAAP financial and operational measures under SEC rules, such as non GAAP gross profit, non GAAP operating expenses, adjusted EBITDA and bookings.

Speaker 1

Reconciliations to GAAP financial measures and certain additional information are also included in today's earnings release, which is available in the Investor Relations section of our company website at www.dwavequantum.com. I'll now hand over the call to Alan.

Speaker 2

Thanks, Kevin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. It's a remarkable time to be leading one of the world's preeminent quantum computing companies, and it is incredible how much has happened since we spoke to you last quarter. Big companies like Google, NVIDIA, Amazon and Microsoft all made Quantum headlines recently, fueling debate among Quantum industry skeptics, enthusiasts and undecideds as to when Quantum will be able to solve real problems. At D Wave, we are seeing firsthand the value that Quantum is providing today for hundreds of companies.

Speaker 2

I'm not talking about fifteen or thirty years from now, I'm talking about today. We recently laid out a framework to help people formulate an informed position on Quantum. We call it Quantum Realized and it's very simple. First, does the Quantum Company have technology that can solve complex problems better or faster than classical computing alone? Second, are the Quantum systems highly performant, reliable and available?

Speaker 2

And third, does the Quantum Company have proven commercial customer successes in proofs of concept and in production application deployment? These are the criteria that customers need to see to realize real value today, And we believe that there is only one company that can meet all those criteria right now, and that is D Wave Quantum. It's a very exciting time for D Wave. Our business momentum continues, and we have never been in a stronger position as a company. We are making tremendous progress with our technical development milestones and scientific achievements, most recently evidenced by yesterday's peer reviewed publication in Science of our demonstration of quantum supremacy on a real world problem.

Speaker 2

We're the only quantum company that can claim it has outperformed classical on a useful problem of relevance to business and science today. You can also see the momentum in our business results as we closed the first sale of an ADDvantage system to the Yulex Supercomputing Center, which led to record quarterly bookings of $18,300,000 in the fourth quarter of twenty twenty four. The momentum is also reflected on our balance sheet, where we now have over $300,000,000 in cash on hand, which we believe is enough to get us to sustain profitability. As previously stated, we expect to be the first pure play quantum company to reach profitability and with less cash invested than any of our competitors. We truly are a market leader.

Speaker 2

We were the first to launch commercial quantum systems, the first to have quantum applications running in production for commercial customers, and now the first to achieve a demonstration of quantum supremacy on a real world problem. D Wave is quantum realized. Let me now walk you through some key business highlights, starting with technical achievements. We are proud to be the first in the world to demonstrate quantum supremacy on a useful real world problem. This groundbreaking work was achieved using our 1,200 qubit Advantage-two prototype annealing quantum computer, and it was published in a peer reviewed paper in Science on March 12.

Speaker 2

Unlike other attempts, this achievement is the world's first and only demonstration of quantum computational supremacy on a useful problem and with relevance to customer problems today in material science. Dewey's quantum computer performed the complex simulation in minutes and with a level of accuracy that would take nearly one million years using one of the world's most powerful supercomputers. In addition, it would require more than the world's annual electricity consumption to solve this problem using the supercomputer, which is built with graphics processing unit or GPU clusters. It's a truly remarkable achievement. We encourage you to check out the paper today on science.org.

Speaker 2

Development of our sixth generation annealing quantum computer, Advantage two, is rapidly progressing and we recently announced the calibration of a third four thousand four hundred qubit ADDvantage II processor. Compared with the current ADDvantage system, the ADDvantage II processor delivers significant performance gains with doubled Qbit coherence time, which drives faster time to solution, a 40% increase in energy scale for higher quality solutions and increased Qbit connectivity from 15 way to 20 way, enabling solutions to larger and more complex problems. Next, let me turn to our commercial momentum. In February, we announced the first sale of a D Wave advantage annealing quantum computing system to the ULEC Supercomputing Center in Germany. The system has already been installed at ULEC and we expect it will be connected to the JUPITER Supercomputer, Europe's First and only exascale high performance computer.

Speaker 2

By owning the system, ULEC has full control over all aspects of the system, which will enable them to work on breakthroughs in AI and quantum optimization applications. I should also note that this is not an in kind transaction or a research grant. It is a sale of a commercial grade quantum computer. You look prepaid for the system in the fourth quarter and this is a highly profitable sale for D Wave. We received substantial interest from other potential customers about purchasing an ADDvantage system as they recognize the significant benefits of owning a system outright.

Speaker 2

It enables them to tightly integrate with existing classical and high performance computing systems, leverage and tune system parameters and take advantage of new system innovations such as advanced analog digital features as they are developed. We see system sales as an important component in our go to market strategy moving forward. That said, it's important to note that we expect to focus on the quantum compute as a service model with the vast majority of our commercial customers who are most interested in running business applications. We continue to work with customers on developing a variety of quantum and hybrid quantum applications, including drug discovery with Japan Tobacco insurance portfolio optimization with LATA, the technology and data factory of Unipol, a leading Italian insurance company and optimization of police vehicle deployment with North Wales Police. In addition, we recently announced a commercial hybrid quantum application built with our partner STACK that simulates and optimizes movements of autonomous agriculture vehicles.

Speaker 2

We believe that this could have important benefits to farmers as they adopt autonomous agriculture machines in order to scale and increase the output of their fields with quantum computing providing the analysis speed and accuracy to help maximize production and minimize costs. We're also seeing increased interest from the broader industry in hearing about D Wave and our technology's near term value at major events and conferences. Just yesterday, I was at the annual South by Southwest Conference sharing the momentous news of our quantum supremacy results and discussing how organizations are realizing tangible benefits from our quantum computing systems. I talked about how our quantum computers are now providing faster, more accurate and less expensive solutions than classical computers for evolutionary applications such as optimizing mobile networks, creating more efficient workforce schedules and streamlining automotive manufacturing. Next week, I will be at NVIDIA's GTC Quantum Day, where I will have the opportunity to educate people on the benefits of annealing quantum computing, D Wave's differentiated market position and how we're solving customers' computational complex problems right now at scale, while others remain stuck in research and development.

Speaker 2

On the heels of GTC Quantum Day, I invite you all to join us on March 31 at D Wave's annual Qubit User Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. We are really excited about the lineup of company executives, customers and industry thought leaders that will address the ways that D Wave products are delivering value to customers now. You will hear from speakers, including Charles Payne of Fox Businesses Making Money with Charles Payne, IDC, Davidson Technologies, ULEC, Japan Tobacco, NTT DOCOMO, Quantum Research Sciences, SAS, Busan National University and the University of Southern California, among others. We expect this event will be a powerful demonstration of quantum realized. Turning now to a couple of updates on our go to market growth strategy.

Speaker 2

We recently announced our Quantum Uplift program, offering incentives to organizations that have been disappointed with the results they've seen from competitors' quantum systems. We hear a lot of dissatisfaction when talking to potential customers about the lack of reliability and uptime they experience with competitor systems and more importantly those systems inability to solve practical real world problems. For those customers, we believe that D Wave can help them start to realize the benefits of quantum and hybrid quantum now. To accelerate adoption of our annealing quantum computing technology, we announced the LEAP Quantum LaunchPad program, a three month trial that provides access to dWay systems, our LEAP real time quantum cloud service and our team of quantum experts for project support. We believe that this program can expand the universe of organizations using quantum to solve their complex problems today.

Speaker 2

We also continue to build out our management and leadership bench. In November of twenty twenty four, we announced the appointment of Sharon Holt to our Board of Directors. Sharon has significant experience in the technology sector as an executive investor and Board member. She has worked in semiconductors, embedded technologies and intellectual property and has quickly become a very valuable addition to our Board. Finally, let me close with some quick comments on our financials.

Speaker 2

As I noted, the signing of the Yulek deal drove $18,300,000 in bookings for Q4 of twenty twenty four, and that's a 502% increase over the fourth quarter of twenty twenty three. I also noted that we were paid for that deal during the fourth quarter, which brought in a substantial amount of cash. We also completed two separate ATM programs in the fourth quarter that brought in a total of $175,000,000 in gross proceeds in 2024, which resulted in a record cash position of $178,000,000 at year end. In January of this year, we raised an additional $150,000,000 in gross proceeds from another ATM program, which led us to a current cash balance in excess of $300,000,000 I will reiterate that we believe that this is sufficient capital to get D Wave to profitability, and we continue to believe we will reach that milestone faster than any other independent quantum company and with far less total investment. And last, in a few minutes, you will hear from John that we expect our fiscal year twenty twenty five Q1 revenue to exceed $10,000,000 With that, I'll hand it over to John to provide a review of fourth quarter and fiscal year twenty twenty four results.

Speaker 2

John?

Speaker 3

Thank you, Alan, and thank you to everyone taking the time to participate in today's call. In my review of the fiscal 'twenty four and fourth quarter results, I'll be providing non GAAP operating metrics, including bookings as well as non GAAP financial metrics that include non GAAP gross profit, non GAAP gross margins, adjusted net loss and adjusted EBITDA loss as we believe these metrics improve investors' ability to evaluate our underlying operating performance. These measures are defined in the tables at the bottom of today's earnings press release with the non GAAP financial metrics for the most part adjusting for non cash and non recurring expenses. Revenue for fiscal 'twenty four was $8,800,000 essentially flat with fiscal 'twenty three revenue of $8,800,000 As Alan highlighted previously, bookings for fiscal 'twenty four were a record $23,900,000 which is an increase of 128% or $13,400,000 from the fiscal twenty twenty three bookings of $10,500,000 With respect to customers, we continue to broaden and diversify our customer base across commercial government and research customers. In comparing fiscal twenty twenty four with fiscal twenty twenty three, D Wave had a total of 135 customers in fiscal twenty twenty four compared with a total of 133 customers in fiscal twenty twenty three.

Speaker 3

That includes 59 research institution and government customers in 2024 compared with 55 in fiscal twenty twenty three and seventy six commercial customers in fiscal twenty twenty four compared to 78 in fiscal twenty twenty three with the commercial customers including 28 Forbes Global two thousand customers in fiscal 'twenty four compared with 27 in fiscal 'twenty three, with such customers constituting 37% of the total number of commercial customers in 2024. GAAP gross profit for fiscal 'twenty four was $5,600,000 an increase of $1,000,000 or 20% in fiscal twenty twenty three GAAP gross profit of $4,600,000 with the improvement due primarily to an increase in higher margin QCaaS revenue and a decrease in stock based compensation expense in the cost of sales. Non GAAP gross profit for fiscal twenty twenty four was $6,400,000 an increase of $300,000 or 5% from fiscal twenty twenty three non GAAP gross profit of $6,100,000 GAAP gross margin for fiscal twenty twenty four was 63%, an increase of 10.2% from fiscal 'twenty three GAAP gross margins of 52.8%. The non GAAP gross margin for fiscal twenty twenty four was 72.8%, an increase of 3% from the fiscal twenty twenty three non GAAP gross margin of 69.8%.

Speaker 3

Again, the difference between GAAP and non GAAP gross profit and gross margin is limited to non cash stock based compensation and depreciation and amortization expenses that are excluded from the non GAAP gross profit and gross margin measures. Net loss for fiscal twenty twenty four was $143,900,000 or $0.75 per share compared with the fiscal twenty twenty three net loss of $82,700,000 or 0.6 per share. The increase was due primarily to a $68,300,000 non cash, non operating charge related to the remeasurement of the Company's warrant liability, which materially increased as a result of the significant increase in the value of the Company's warrants that correlated with the price appreciation of D Wave's common stock. Excluding this remeasurement charge, the net loss for fiscal twenty twenty four was $75,600,000 or $0.39 per share, a decrease of $7,300,000 or $0.21 per share from the fiscal twenty twenty three net loss of $83,000,000 or $0.6 per share. Adjusted EBITDA loss for fiscal twenty twenty four was $56,000,000 an increase of $1,700,000 or 3% from the adjusted EBITDA loss of $54,300,000 in fiscal twenty twenty three with the increase due primarily to higher operating expenses driven by our increased investment in our go to market in research and development organizations.

Speaker 3

With respect to the fourth quarter operating results, revenue in the fourth quarter of fiscal twenty twenty four totaled $2,300,000 a decrease of approximately $600,000 or 21% from the fourth quarter of fiscal twenty twenty three revenue, $2,900,000 Bookings for the fourth quarter were a record 18,300,000 an increase of $15,300,000 or over 500% when compared to the fiscal twenty twenty three fourth quarter bookings of $3,000,000 GAAP gross profit for fiscal 'twenty four fourth quarter was $1,500,000 a decrease of approximately $500,000 or 25% from the fiscal twenty twenty three fourth quarter gross profit of $2,000,000 with a decrease due primarily to lower professional services revenue that was partly offset by higher QCash revenue. Non GAAP gross profit for the fourth quarter was $1,700,000 a decrease of approximately $600,000 or 28% from the fiscal twenty twenty three fourth quarter non GAAP gross profit of $2,300,000 GAAP gross margin for the fiscal twenty twenty four fourth quarter was 63.8, a decrease of 3.9% from the fiscal twenty twenty three fourth quarter GAAP gross margin of 67.7%. Non GAAP gross margin for the fourth quarter was 73%, a decrease of 7.2% from the fiscal twenty twenty three fourth quarter non GAAP gross margin.

Speaker 3

Net loss for the fourth quarter was $86,100,000 or $0.37 per share compared with a net loss of $16,000,000 or $0.1 per share in the fourth quarter of fiscal twenty twenty three. Again, the increase was primarily due to the aforementioned $68,300,000 non cash, non operating warrant liability remeasurement charge. Excluding this charge, the fourth quarter net loss was $17,800,000 or $0.08 per share, an increase of $1,500,000 and a decrease of $0.03 per share from the fiscal twenty twenty three fourth quarter net loss of $16,400,000 or $0.1 per share. Adjusted EBITDA loss for the fourth quarter was $15,300,000 an increase of $4,400,000 or 41% from the fiscal twenty twenty three fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA loss of $10,900,000 with the increase due primarily to lower revenue and higher operating expenses that were principally related to the Company's increased investment in our go to market and research and development organizations. Now, I will address the balance sheet liquidity.

Speaker 3

As of December 31, Dewey's consolidated cash balance totaled $178,000,000 and as of today, exceeds $300,000,000 As Alan highlighted earlier, during the fourth quarter, we raised $161,300,000 in equity through our ATM programs and our equity line of credit, the ELOC program. And during the current quarter, we raised an additional $146,200,000 under an at the market program for a total of net proceeds of $3.00 $7,000,000 since the beginning of the fourth quarter. '2 hundred and '90 '5 point '4 million dollars or 96% of this $307,500,000 was raised over the course of twenty three trading days under the ATM program is an average price per share of $4.3 that was $0.08 per share higher than the corresponding volume weighted average price of $4.22 per share over the same twenty three trading days. In addition, D Wave paid off the remaining balance of our $50,000,000 secured term loan with PSPIB Unitas Investments during the fourth quarter. At the December, you may have had $37,800,000 remaining in issuance capacity under the Eloc with Lincoln Park Capital Fund with the investment commitment running through October for this year.

Speaker 3

Our ability to utilize the HELOC is subject to a number of conditions, including having a sufficient number of registered shares and the stock price being above $1 a share. With respect to guidance, we are expecting fiscal twenty twenty five first quarter revenue to exceed $10,000,000 with a significant portion of the first quarter revenue, including revenue recognized from the sale of an advantage annealing quantum computer. To conclude, as we have previously stated, we believe that D Wave has the opportunity to be the first independent publicly held quantum computing company to achieve sustained profitability and achieve this milestone with substantially less cumulative funding than required by other independent publicly held quantum computing companies. With that, we will now proceed to questions.

Operator

Thank you. And our first question comes from the line of Craig Ellis with B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.

Speaker 4

Hi. Yes, it's Maher on for Craig. First of all, congratulations on yesterday's announcement and a great quarter. And I kind of wanted to dig into that a little bit more. As kind of advantage to kind of build out that frontier of what's capable with commercial annealing, do you see that sort of forwarding the engagements that you already have with your existing commercial customers?

Speaker 2

So, thank you for joining and for the question. Absolutely. So, the interesting thing about Advantage two versus Advantage is that when we started down the path of trying to demonstrate quantum supremacy, we began with our 5,000 qubit Advantage system, and we actually were not able to get the result. However, when we finished calibrating a 1,200 qubit Advantage two processor, so a quarter the number of qubits, much smaller system, we were able to get the result. The reason is while it has fewer qubits, it's more highly connected, it has twice as long coherence time and it has a significantly higher energy scale.

Speaker 2

This means it can actually solve bigger problems faster and with higher precision results. So arguably, at 1,200 cubits, ADDvantage II is significantly more powerful than ADDvantage at 5,000 cubits. We've now finished calibrating our third ADDvantage II system, And we plan to roll that out commercially, basically to make that system generally available over the course of this year, hopefully sooner rather than later. And we do believe that the increased power will allow not only new customers, but our current customers to see improved performance on their applications. So yes, this absolutely will make an impact.

Speaker 4

Awesome. That's great. Now kind of shifting gears to that to your first system fill with Euliq. First of all, congratulations on getting a system fill through and expanding the business in that way. I kind of wanted to ask, is this something that you kind of can expect to continue across 2025 with perhaps more of the system sales and pipelines?

Speaker 4

And what could potential revenues there look like? And then kind of adding on to that, what are kind of some of these margin mechanics that might go on with systems sales as we balance against QCash?

Speaker 2

Okay. That actually sounded like three follow-up questions, but let me try to respond. So first of all, the supremacy work had a lot to do with that system sales, the ULEC, as well as to the increased interest we are now seeing for system sales. Remember, we posted the paper demonstrating quantum supremacy on the archive, the preprint server about a year ago, and then it took a year to go through the peer review process. So while we were able to talk about it to customers, we couldn't talk about it to the press and that was what we were able to do finally yesterday.

Speaker 2

However, we've been able to talk about this to a variety of different researchers at supercomputing centers and national labs around the world. And as I said, it's that result that has generated an enormous amount of interest in owning a system, connecting it to high performance classical computers and using that to explore a variety of new workloads in important areas like AI. So in addition to the sale to UIC, we now have discussions underway with three other institutions. I'm not going to tell you that we expect to see three more system sales anytime soon, but we do have discussions underway with three other institutions around the world. So I actually and absolutely do believe that system sales will become an important component of our sales bookings and revenue model going forward.

Speaker 2

However, not to the exclusion of quantum compute as a service because many of our commercial customers are really just interested in running their business applications. And for those customers, quantum compute as a service is in fact the better model, and that will continue and we expect continue to grow, while on the research institution and university and sorry, governmental lab front, we expect to transition more to system sales. And other than that, we can't give you any guidance on what we expect system sales to look like going forward or bookings or revenue we expect to achieve from that. But John may want to spend just a minute on margins.

Speaker 3

Sure. You can expect that the margins on our system sales will exceed our consolidated non GAAP gross margins, which last year were 72.8%.

Operator

Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Richard Shannon with Craig Hallum. Please go ahead.

Speaker 5

Well, great, Alan and John, thanks for taking my questions. I guess I want to follow-up on the paper as well and hearing your response to the last question, I'll certainly modify it. But I'd love to get a sense of the degree to which this paper, both as you published in archive a year ago and now published fully and publicly yesterday has changed the opinion of both the academic community that I think has had some resistance to annealing and its capabilities. And you've also talked about kind of the headwind of quantum adoption just from big IT suppliers like IBM who've said that quantum is not ready. This seems to be a pretty strong statement.

Speaker 5

So I guess I'd love to get your sense both from what you're hearing from commercial entities and maybe some of the thought leaders in the quantum community about how much this is changing their opinions?

Speaker 2

So first of all, with respect to the academic community, keep in mind that quite a few academic institutions actually partnered with us on this result. We worked with 11 institutions around the world, and a number of the people from those institutions are actually co authors on the paper. And yes, this has been a significant achievement relative to not just the impact on the quantum industry and the commercial market, but also on the academic community. Now that having been said, not everybody is willing to readily accept reality. And so we still have some folks in the academic community that are, that go down kicking and screaming, if you like.

Speaker 2

In fact, yesterday, there were two papers that were put up on the archive preprint server that essentially said, oh, we can do this classically, right, which of course is a gross overstatement, if not absurd. And we actually put up our own paper on the preprint server that pointed out exactly what they did and there was some good work embedded in that and how far away from being able to perform the computations that we performed on our quantum computer they actually were. And so this result that we published yesterday is a huge step forward for the quantum industry in that it truly is the first time that anybody has been able to demonstrate the ability to solve a problem on a quantum computer that cannot be solved classically. This is what everybody in the quantum industry has been aspiring to and working toward since the inception, and we've now achieved it. And that's a very significant and important milestone for, as I said, the industry and the marketplace alike, and we're quite proud.

Speaker 2

And yes, it is adding an impact on the commercial side of our business. As I said, it's opening up some very important opportunities to work more closely with research institutions and government research labs. And as you know, government has been a bit more challenging for us than commercial, but the dialogue is absolutely changing at a rapid pace. And it generates even more interest from commercial businesses as it starts to kind of knelt away that rhetoric around annealing versus gate. It's just about quantum computing and the ability to solve important problems that classical struggles with.

Speaker 5

Wonderful. Alan, we look forward to hearing more about that at Cubits in a couple of weeks. My follow on question is, and I'll resist the temptation to a three parter and probably make it more of a two parter here, but looking at a couple of numbers here, your bookings were $18,000,000 in the quarter and you're talking about guidance in the first quarter of above $10,000,000 And if we just kind of look at the run rates of revenues last year, people might assume there's going to be roughly $8,000,000 or a little bit more recognized from the ULEC contract here, which had $18,000,000 in bookings here. So maybe you can help us understand either is the should we expect the sales in the first quarter to be meaningfully above $10,000,000 or alternatively, what was the other contribution for the strong bookings in the fourth quarter?

Speaker 2

John, do you want to answer that question?

Speaker 3

Sure. So obviously, the systems booking was a very significant portion of the fourth quarter bookings. And the guidance we provided with respect to revenue for the first quarter, as we've outlined, a very substantial portion of that will be related to the installation and the acceptance of the system. But, we've not provided any additional details on the fourth quarter bookings above and beyond what we announced earlier, which was the $18,300,000 And we haven't provided any additional breakdown on the first quarter revenue other than we expect the revenue to exceed $10,000,000

Operator

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Quinn Bolton with Needham and Company. Please go ahead.

Speaker 6

Congratulations on multiple fronts with the cash and the quantum supremacy. I guess I wanted to follow-up there on Richard's question. I understand you don't want to provide too much additional question on detail on the $18,300,000 in bookings, but if revenue is only in the $10 ish million range, might imply then that you saw a substantial increase in Q cast bookings. And I'm just wondering if you can comment if you excluded the system bookings, can you describe sort of the trends you're seeing on the Q cast side of the business? Was there a meaningful increase in bookings related to non system sales in the fourth quarter?

Speaker 6

And then I've got a follow-up.

Speaker 3

The QCaaS bookings in the fourth quarter, Quinn, were incrementally greater than they were in the third quarter.

Speaker 6

Okay, perfect. And then maybe just sort of a follow-up on the system of sale. Is this when that system is accepted by ULEC, you recognize the revenue for the hardware sale. Is there an ongoing maintenance or support contract where some of the fourth quarter bookings may be recognized over time in that sort of maintenance or support, so it almost kicks in a recurring revenue stream for some period of quarters or years?

Speaker 5

So there are three other elements

Speaker 1

go ahead, John. There are

Speaker 3

three other revenue elements of that booking. One is that the contract includes an upgrade option for Advantage two, also includes ongoing support and maintenance as well as some degree of access to LEAP or QCash. Again, the bulk of the booking will manifest itself in the system sale, but there are some components that will go beyond the first quarter.

Speaker 2

Got it. Okay.

Speaker 6

And then the last question just for Alan on ADDvantage two. Congratulations on the third four thousand four hundred kubit processor calibration. As you look to bring ADDvantage two to the market, are you now sort of anticipating bringing that to market at the 4,400 qubit level or are there still plans to move to 7,000 qubits with that system over time? Just trying to think through kind of the go to market on Advantage two as we look forward?

Speaker 2

Yes. So we are going to bring the 4,400 qubit system to market. And in fact, the reason why we're now at three calibrated Advantage two systems, but haven't yet, if you like, put it in LEAP as another processor as we did with the 1,200 qubit prototype is because when we do bring a processor to market versus making it available as a prototype, part of what we need to do is make sure that we have the ability to get all the LEAP systems upgraded as well as whatever customer systems might be out there, I think of the ULEC system. So we just need to make sure we have enough calibrated processors to support the full rollout of the product. And so that's what we're working toward right now and we expect that it will become generally available later this year.

Speaker 2

As far as moving to a larger Advantage two system. What we are working toward right now is a slightly different approach to scaling. Up until now, our approach to scaling has always been more qubits on the chip. And we've got more headroom to grow the system size beyond where we are today, whether it's 4,400 qubits on a chip or 5,000 qubits on a chip. At the same time, you should never bet against distributed versus centralized.

Speaker 2

And so we are also moving down the R and D path of multi chip processors to be able to scale not just by more qubits on a chip, but by interconnecting multiple chips. And we think that that's actually going to allow us to scale much faster going forward. And so we're in the process of kind of developing that capability, which we think will likely be how we the most significant portion of how we scale going forward.

Operator

Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Suji Desilva with Roth Capital. Please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Good morning, Alan. Good morning, John. Congratulations on the progress here. The system sale you had, I'm wondering if the future ones you'll have, would they generally have a similar upfront versus recurring kind of percent breakout? Or might there be different structures to future hardware sales versus the current one?

Speaker 7

Just want to understand that revenue model.

Speaker 2

Yes. Suji, these deals, at least on a sample size of one, tend to be structured to meet the specific needs of the customer. So there are a lot of elements that went into exactly how we structured this deal. In the case of ULEC, it was important to them that the upgrade to Advantage two be included, especially since we were so close to the Advantage two processor becoming available. That might not always be the case.

Speaker 2

Secondly, depending on who we're selling to, they might be looking to use the system in different ways. Are they using it to support commercial applications? Or are they using it to support research? Are they using it to support education, research and education? And depending on the exact nature of how they plan to use the system, that might also drive how the deal gets structured and what the cost components are.

Speaker 2

So I think it's not really possible for us to say this is the model. I think it will vary by customer.

Speaker 7

Great, Alan. That's very helpful. And then switching over to the results yesterday and the system, I understand that the connectivity intensity would help performance. Can Can you just remind us in the quantum systems what the higher power allows the systems to do in terms of performance? Just remind us that technical aspect.

Speaker 2

Okay. When you say higher power, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. I believe you said like Thomas said, it was a combination of higher power and increased connectivity that allowed you to achieve the results that

Speaker 4

you have to

Speaker 8

be just

Speaker 2

wondering. Yes. No, sorry. It was three elements. It was more connectivity, longer coherence times and higher energy scale.

Speaker 2

So more connectivity allows us to support larger and more complex problems. Longer coherence time allows us to get to optimal solutions faster. And higher energy scale allows us to specify the problem parameters with greater precision. So this collectively means larger, more complex problems solve faster and with greater precision. Thank

Operator

you. And your next question comes from the line of David Williams with Benchmark. Please go ahead.

Speaker 6

Hey, good morning and congratulations on all the progress here. I guess maybe first, John, just thinking about your balance sheet now that you're fully capitalized and you should have some pretty significant flexibility here. But does this change anything on your go to market strategy?

Speaker 2

And it sounds like you've got some R

Speaker 6

and D efforts now that we haven't really heard about before in terms of the scaling. But just wondering, are there other areas of the business you can accelerate or does the capitalization maybe change how you're thinking about the business as you scale up and go forward?

Speaker 3

David, there are elements of the business that we could scale at a faster pace. And given that our capital raise or the magnitude of our capital raise has been so recent, we're still in the process of evaluating where it may or may not make sense to increase the rate and nature of the investments?

Speaker 2

Yes, John, maybe I'll just say a tiny bit more than that. Obviously, I talked a few minutes ago about how we're looking at introducing new capability to scale the size of the processor more rapidly through multi chip in addition to continuing to grow the density of qubits on a single chip. A second area is gate model. I mean, we've been working on our gate model program for a couple of years now, and we do think that now represents an opportunity to look at how we might accelerate that program. And so that is an area of focus for us.

Speaker 2

And as you said, go to market. We will kind of operate this year with significantly more salespeople, technical presales and professional services than we had last year, which we are hopeful will allow us to grow the business faster.

Speaker 8

Great. Thanks for that.

Speaker 6

And then maybe, Alan, just kind of thinking about some of the comments that we heard from NVIDIA's CEO, more recently at CES, discounting the usefulness of quantum, then you're going to be there on a panel participating. Then clearly you've shown these incredible results for the quantum supremacy. I'm just wondering how you're thinking about maybe the paradigm shift that you're hearing from customers and it sounds like you're certainly getting that interest. But what else are you hearing and how do you think this changes the industry as we kind of move forward here and think about what you've already accomplished and versus where maybe some of the less optimistic folks are out there in terms of how they're thinking about quantum? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes. So David, first of all, while this supremacy result is absolutely groundbreaking and critically important for the industry, Magnetic materials simulation isn't necessarily something that is a kitchen table discussion. So not everybody it doesn't resonate with everybody as it does with us. And we think it's extremely important because magnetic materials are used everywhere, especially in medical devices, and we think this represents an opportunity to more rapidly and more cost effectively design new materials and as a result bring to market improved devices that incorporate sensors based on these materials. But there are other application areas, for example, related to AI, maybe some other areas where a broader portion of the population has a greater interest.

Speaker 2

And so you mentioned NVIDIA's GTC conference. I am very much looking forward to participating on the panel at GTC. And I will tell you that the Quantum Supremacy result actually has applicability beyond magnetic material simulation. Now I'm not going to tell you what that applicability is, but I am going to tell you it's broader based with respect to the likely public interest. And I am also going to tell you that you should kind of pay attention to Quantum Day on March 20 and what we have to say about it.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Harsh Kumar with Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Speaker 8

Yes. Hey, guys. Congratulations on a lot of good things that are going on. Alan, I had one for you and then a follow-up. I wanted to ask about ULEC plus JUPITER.

Speaker 8

So this is outside institution that's going to couple one of your systems through traditional computing, potentially a large supercomputer. You've done these kind of projects before. What does this mean for validation and what does this mean for opening up the market for other people to be able to solve super complex problems as demonstrated by an outside organization in Europe?

Speaker 2

Yes. So actually, Harsh, we have not previously tightly integrated our quantum systems with a supercomputer or a high performance computer. We do run hybrid algorithms and hybrid solvers that our customers can have access to where we can use CPUs and GPUs together with the quantum computer, but that's at a modest scale. That's not massively parallel systems like Frontier at Oak Ridge Labs or the Jupyter exascale system that ULEC is building out. This will actually be the first time that our quantum system is tightly integrated with a supercomputer of that scale.

Speaker 2

And we're very much looking forward to working with ULEC. And in fact, there will be a lot of joint collaborative research and investigation that goes on on the applications that could be made possible through that integration. And we do think that particularly in the area of AI and AI workflows, there could potentially be some very significant opportunity. Because remember, I mean, currently AI does require massive amounts of compute, and we're really looking forward to understanding what happens when you integrate quantum into those workflows and how and if that might change on the one hand the time to do model training, the accuracy of the models, maybe the energy consumption, maybe we can reduce it and so on.

Speaker 8

Perfect. And then another one, maybe just broadening your mind a little bit. So now you've got sort of two businesses. You can sell systems, which there seems to be you already said there are three interested parties, but you also have a business associated with services. What does Doctor.

Speaker 8

Alan Barrett want to do? What are you interested, where are you leaning towards as QB as D Wave looks forward? I guess, and then I would be curious if John has input on it too financially. It's very lucrative obviously, this the business of selling these computers. But just curious if you could shed your light on where your interest lies?

Speaker 2

Well, look, I think all my babies are beautiful. So first of all, we have an amazing R and D team that continues to knock the ball out of the park. And so I'm really looking forward to delivering the ADDvantage II system. I'm looking forward to how we're going to be able to scale that more rapidly going forward through both multi chip and increased density on the chips. I'm looking forward to gate because I do think that gate and annealing are quite complementary and can enable collectively important use cases.

Speaker 2

I'm looking forward to continuing to support our customers in their use of quantum to help solve really hard optimization problems to improve their business operations. And I'm especially interested in the introduction of quantum into AI machine learning because I do think there's a huge opportunity there to speed up training and to reduce energy consumption. And I do think that could be very transformative.

Operator

Thank you. And we do have a follow-up question coming from the line of Harsh Kumar with Piper Samsler. Please go ahead.

Speaker 8

Yes. So, thanks again for another opportunity to ask a question. I wanted to ask about so a lot of people on the call were trying to basically ask about the mechanism of the system sales and what it would do. I was curious, so assume that most of the money that you got for the system sales were recognized in 4Q, John, and but yet you're talking about a substantial increase in revenues in 1Q and that's driven by your core business. So I was curious, A, what is driving the core business all of a sudden that something happened or did you lock down a couple of large customers or is there a trickling effect of the system sales that kicking in into 1Q as well?

Speaker 3

Sure. So the systems booking took place in the fourth quarter, Harsh, and we were paid for that system in the fourth quarter. And what we've outlined with respect to our first quarter guidance of revenue in excess of $10,000,000 a significant portion of that will be the installation and acceptance of the system.

Speaker 2

Yes. Harsh, you said something that wasn't quite accurate. You said that a portion of the system sale was recognized, revenue recognized in Q4. That's not the case. There's no revenue recognized in Q4 for the system sale.

Speaker 3

It was just the booking.

Speaker 8

Got it. So how many quarters do you think the process I mean, it's a complicated system. I've seen your system in Canada and it's not like a computer where you can just take it. So how many quarters do you think the process will take to set it up to get it going and the handholding that you would need to do if you like to so in other words, how many quarters can the revenue run for one system sales? Just you don't have to accurately tell me, this is ballpark it.

Speaker 2

The Advantage system is already set up and running at ULEC and they have access to it. They are using it today. So we were able so that was all completed since we signed the agreement for the system sale in Q4. Now what has not yet happened is that that system has not yet been upgraded with the Advantage two chip. So as John said, there are a couple of components to the revenue recognition.

Speaker 2

Big part of it is when we install the system and hand it over to them. That's been done. That was done this quarter, Q1. Some of the revenue will be recognized when we upgrade that processor to Advantage two And then some of that revenue will be recognized through ongoing maintenance over several years into the future.

Operator

Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen,

Speaker 7

that concludes our question and answer session. I will now hand the call back to Doctor.

Operator

Alan Barats for closing remarks.

Speaker 2

Thank you. Thanks to all of you for taking the time to be here with us today. It's been an amazing quarter for the company and the future looks even more amazing. We believe that the company is in the strongest position in its history and is leading the quantum computing sector based on product performance, technical maturity and commercial adoption. While others in the industry continue to make unsubstantiated claims around the performance and adoption of their technology, we continue to capitalize on our first mover advantage to further distance ourselves from the rest of the market.

Speaker 2

We're a well capitalized company with more than $300,000,000 in cash and sufficient capital to reach profitability. We're the only quantum computing company that has demonstrated our system's ability to outperform classical on a useful problem, which has now been published in an esteemed peer reviewed journal. We have the largest quantum computers in the world with 5,000 plus qubits able to solve complex computational problems right now. We are the first quantum computing company to have customers move commercial applications into production. And we offer customers service level agreements, which means we stand behind the high levels of availability, reliability and scalability of our LEAP cloud service.

Speaker 2

Our customers are realizing the value of Quantum right now. It's a historic time for the company and for Quantum Computing as a whole. Thanks again for taking the time to join us today.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.

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Earnings Conference Call
D-Wave Quantum Q4 2024
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