Welcome into StockTwits Boardroom, Executives. The quantum era has officially transitioned from the laboratory to the boardroom. While much of the industry remains focused on multi-year benchmarks, D-Wave is reporting record-breaking revenue and an unprecedented surge as well in enterprise adoption. Joining me today to discuss the company's historic start to 2026 and its strategic acquisition of Quantum Circuits is D-Wave CEO Dr. Alan Baratz. Alan, it's great to have you here.
Hi Michelle, it's a pleasure for me to be here and thanks for taking the time to chat.
Absolutely. I want to talk about this historic start that D-Wave has had to 2026. January bookings exceeding all of last year. What do you think shifted in the market to trigger this sudden acceleration from research pilots to eight-figure enterprise contracts?
Yeah, there were actually a few things that came together for us over the course of the last year that allowed us to achieve this, frankly, I think watershed moment in the commercialization of quantum computing. First of all, last year we brought two very important products to market. The first was our latest generation annealing quantum computer called Advantage 2. This is, arguably, the largest and most powerful quantum computer in the world. In fact, it's the only quantum computer on which we've been able to show that we can solve an important real-world problem that cannot be solved classically. So, that's a first for the industry and this is the system that made that possible.
Secondly, we brought to market our latest generation hybrid solver. This is a solver that brings together classical computing, CPUs and GPUs, with our quantum computer to be able to solve problems that are even larger than what can be solved natively on the quantum computer. And with those two advances over the course of the last year, we're now at the point where we are able to demonstrate to customers that we can solve their hard problems in many cases significantly faster and with significantly better results than what they're seeing classically. So, product advancements were a part of it, but the second element is there have been changes in the market. The market is now much more aware of quantum computing, and that awareness goes higher into the organization. So, we now have larger companies approaching us with visibility up the management chain interested in understanding how quantum can be leveraged to improve their business operations. And as these two things have come together over the course of the last year, advances with respect to our products and greater awareness up the management chain within larger corporations, we're starting to see far more significant opportunity. So, for example, we did announce in January that we had closed an enterprise license agreement. This is with a Fortune 100 company, and this is essentially an all-you-can-eat two-year agreement allowing them to build and deploy multiple applications over the course of that two-year period.
You know, this leads me actually to your most recent strategic expansion, right? Into new technical territories, the QCI acquisition, of course. Big, big move here. How do these dual-rail qubits change your timeline for delivering a useful error-corrected gate-model computer compared to your competitors?
Yeah. So, everything that I talked about a minute ago was with respect to our Advantage 2 annealing quantum computer. And there are two important approaches to quantum computing in the industry, annealing and gate model, and they're each good at solving different types of problems. We are the world leader in annealing. We're the only company in the world that has commercial-grade annealing quantum computers. With the acquisition of Quantum Circuits, we've essentially also catapulted the company to the forefront of gate-model quantum computing as well. And the reason is that Quantum Circuits has some very revolutionary qubit technology. And in order to kind of put this in context, let me kind of take a step back and explain that there are many different technological approaches to building gate-model quantum computers. They include superconducting, trapped ion, neutral atom, photonic. And they each have advantages and disadvantages. The advantage to superconducting is it's very fast. Superconducting computations happen at nanosecond speeds, whereas it's microseconds or milliseconds for the other approaches to quantum computing, trapped ion, neutral atom, photonic. So, superconducting is the fastest, a thousand times faster than any of the other approaches. But, superconducting qubits have lower quality than the other approaches. Trapped ion, neutral atom, they are significantly higher quality qubits. What that means is that the trapped ion or neutral atom approaches can error correct more efficiently. And as a result, it's believed that they will achieve error-corrected gate-model systems ahead of superconducting. So, that's the debate in the industry. Should I go with trapped ion and neutral atom because they're going to get to error-corrected systems sooner and I'll be able to use them sooner, or should I, quote, wait for superconducting because once they are error corrected, they'll be a thousand times faster? Well, Quantum Circuits just changed that debate. And the reason is the technology that Quantum Circuits brought us when we acquired them at the beginning of this year were superconducting qubits. So, they're superconducting speed, a thousand times faster than trapped ion and neutral atom, but they have the quality of trapped ions. In other words, you can error correct them just as efficiently as you can error correct trapped ions. What this means is that we will be able to deliver error-corrected gate-model systems as quickly as anybody else, but we will have superconducting speeds. And that really is transformational, I believe, for the industry and puts us at the forefront in gate model as well.
Yeah, and to that point, by acquiring dual-rail qubit technology, you're bridging the gap between near-term optimization and long-term error-corrected gate-model computing. And this is interesting because it does make D-Wave a dual-platform provider. Why do you think it's critical for an enterprise customer to have access to both annealing and gate-model approaches under one roof?
Yeah. So, what we now know is that there are certain types of problems that require annealing quantum computers for a speedup, and other types of problems that require gate-model quantum computers for a speedup. Specifically, business optimization problems. Things like workforce scheduling or crew scheduling or pricing optimization or manufacturing plant floor optimization. They require an annealing quantum computer to deliver a speedup. Gate-model systems are not very good at solving that class of problems.
