Rating: Highly Speculative / Selective buy on pullbacks Style: Quantum hardware optionality Core debate: Is Rigetti becoming a credible superconducting quantum hardware contender with improving commercialization and a much stronger balance sheet, or is the stock still far ahead of the company’s real economic progress? Executive view Rigetti looks better today than it did in the prior version of the thesis, mainly because the company now has a fresher proof point: Q1 2026 revenue of $4.4 million, up sharply year over year, helped by Novera system deliveries, while still maintaining $569 million of cash, cash equivalents, and investments and zero debt. That matters because Rigetti had been easier to like as a technology concept than as a business. Q1 does not solve that gap, but it narrows it. At the same time, the core truth has not changed: this is still a pre-scale quantum hardware company whose valuation depends much more on future technical and commercial milestones than on current fundamentals. The stock is around $18.94 with a market cap of about $6.16 billion, while full-year 2025 revenue was only $7.1 million. That means investors are still underwriting a lot of future success. Why now — Q1 2026 finally gave the story a better operating datapoint The biggest update is that Rigetti’s latest quarter was materially better than the old thesis base. In Q1 2026, the company reported $4.4 million of revenue, versus $1.5 million in Q1 2025, driven by Novera and system-related deliveries. It also reported an operating loss of $26.0 million and a non-GAAP net loss of $14.7 million, which shows the business is still far from profitability, but the revenue improvement matters because it provides evidence that commercialization is not purely theoretical. More importantly, Rigetti ended the quarter with $569 million in cash, cash equivalents, and investments