I am humbled and honored to be here with some distinguished guests and customers. This is, I think, the third time we've done World Quantum Day at the NYSE, and it's become a tradition because not only were we the first public company in the quantum space way back in an ancient era of 2020.
But we like to celebrate our partnership with you and celebrate the trust that you have placed in us. Last year on World Quantum Day, we were an eight-figure revenue company, and we were a quantum computing company only. Scroll forward a year, and we were a nine-figure revenue company. We tripled revenue in a year. We've got strong guidance for the year as well, and we are now a full quantum platform company. So we've expanded from computing to networking and sensing, security and infrastructure. And that ain't the half of it, as they say, in terms of what we accomplished in the last year. I'm very proud of the team.
I'm very proud of these partnerships, and I'm very proud of everyone who helped us organize such a spectacular day. I think you're going to find this our best World Quantum Day yet, and we keep trying to raise the bar every year, and we seem to be managing that. The next two hours or so, we're going to run through an action-packed agenda, as Scott touched on. We're going to talk through what our customers are doing in a customer panel spotlight, and what's unique about our customers this year. And I do think this is a watershed moment, not only strategic inflection points, but financial and tactical. Our customers are leading the market and leading us in our workplaces. And when that happens, everyone should rightly get excited about the fact that quantum, in just the last year, has gone from, you know, a small business that you might be able to sit on the sidelines of for a few years, into something that you need not just for an advantage, but potentially to survive against your competitors. And people are recognizing that, just like in classical machine learning rebranded AI, quantum is going to deliver advantages for all sectors. Right? We had four really exciting announcements this morning.
I thank our colleagues from UMD here for their partnership. We announced the expansion of that. I thank our colleagues from DARPA. I think you've all seen a really exciting quantum memory partnership there. And I thank our partners from the Air Force Research Lab, who have been working with us on groundbreaking quantum networks and computers, as are our friends at EPB. But possibly the most exciting thing for me of the day is this real-world applications benchmarking. We put out a paper this morning. Martin's going to talk more about it with Ariel and Chad and a few of my colleagues. You know, I think we recognize that in delivering 60% of our revenue last year from commercial companies, a third of that international, we're obviously delivering quantum advantage, and we're delivering more advantage. And the reality is we're delivering it at a cost that is compelling. And so today and this morning, we are defining how our industry, we believe, should talk about itself vis-a-vis the time it takes to deliver a useful result and the cost it takes to deliver a useful result. We also celebrate on World Quantum Day our industry.
Our industry has gone from a curiosity to a hobby to an immature business to a business that is obviously scaling when we have nine figures of revenue. And we believe, as we were the first company to seven, eight, and nine figures, we are very much focused on being the first company to ten figures of revenue. Although we haven't told you exactly when we're doing that, and Anders is not going to scold me for that. At the same time as we are scaling, we are noticing that our customers and partners are latching on to a roadmap that we have accelerated far beyond anyone else in the world, both from a cost and time-to-solution perspective. We said a year ago that our roadmap last June was bringing forward what's called Q-Day by as much as five years. Lots of people looked at that announcement and said, 'That's rather aggressive. I don't know how you guys are going to get there.' It doesn't surprise me in the slightest, for those of you that follow this sector, that one year later everybody agrees with us.
They have to keep up with us. They have to keep up with us. They probably won't be able to, candidly. They won't be able to hit the time to solution and the cost. But the reason that we're so bullish on quantum networking and quantum security, both hardware and software solutions, is we know we can deliver progress at that rate. And if we're delivering progress at that rate, it means that quantum security is now something that you need to absolutely be investing in a time horizon that saves your business as early as the end of this administration, and worst-case scenario, later in the 2020s. We are proud partners with our administration, our allies in this administration, and we like to say that our solutions are delivered not only on submarines, but all the way up to satellites. And we're finding that many of you in the room, both government and commercial customers of ours and partners, are taking more and more solutions from us. We're excited about that, and we are here today to proudly say that we are going to always put you first and always do our utmost to deliver that complete solution early, often, securely, on budget, on time.
I think most of you have watched competitors of us flounder around not only the cost but the time horizon that they can deliver a working quantum computer. We have led this industry for 30 years. We were founded in '95. We've led on every single milestone. And we're really realistic about the fact that to deliver solutions for you, you've got to be cost-effective. And so we are celebrating the fact that one year after saying that we can deliver full fault-tolerant machines at under $30 million, we have validated that over and over with partner partners like AT Kearney, and we also have validated it with our near-term machines. Our time to solution, as you're going to hear from Martin, Ariel, and Chad later, is not only sometimes a thousand x faster than superconducting machines, but it can be even 10,000 x. That is a staggering number, and we're going to walk you through why that is the case and how that is the case.
We are the only quantum company that operates in every war-fighting domain and every continent, and we are proud of this — our sensing, networking, computing solutions infrastructure — because we know that the world needs sovereign systems and sovereign solutions, and we want to meet that need. And we're finding that the market is very much coming towards us. As a bit of a preview, the other thing that's exciting about our announcements today is that as problem complexity in a full fault-tolerant world increases, IonQ's roadmap infrastructure scales exceptionally well, exceptionally linearly. And so you see time to solution hardly moves up even as we tackle more and more challenging opportunities in all of your sectors: financial services, energy, material science, pharmaceuticals, defense intelligence, logistics. And this is obviously the hallmark of how we know that working together in this room to build the leading ecosystem and deliver quantum advantage for you, our trusted partners, is going to absolutely happen not just on time, but ahead of, frankly, cost points and time-to-solution points anyone thought possible even a year ago.
I touched on this already. Q-Day is very much here and very much real. And you're going to hear later today about our hardware and software solutions to help make sure that you are not vulnerable. But obviously this is now inside the planning horizon of any CIO, any CTO at any organization, whether you're federal government, state and local government, an ally of ours, or a commercial partner as well. There are, we think, three levels philosophically of delivering cybersecurity in the quantum era. And the bottom of this pyramid is the physical and global infrastructure of quantum key distribution, which, as one of my colleagues, Marco Pistoya, always likes to say, and you'll hear more from Marco in a bit, this is the only security solution that has to break the laws of physics for somebody to hack it. And so you want as much QKD in your business, institution, government as you can. The next level up from this is PQC, a software solution that we are also offering. You can put PQC more quickly in a lot of places. And both of these are connecting to the top of the pyramid, which is our cloud virtual quantum key management. We are investing here because we want you to be safe, because we know that Q-Day is coming sooner, and because we have the computers that can test and, frankly, demonstrate whether or not you're fully secure. And we have them sooner than everybody else. So being in the IonQ ecosystem is a really fortuitous and fortunate opportunity for us to be in lockstep not only on delivering quantum advantage solutions, but also keeping you safe.
On a global basis, you're seeing quantum key distribution be adopted in countries in Europe, countries in Asia. You're seeing, of course, every piece of our ecosystem expand. We have a vision not only for the leading computers and leading security, but also for the leading quantum data centers, because we recognize that each of you has different needs. Sometimes you want a machine in your control. Sometimes you want half a machine in your control. Sometimes you want cloud access and a more powerful cloud access. We will provide all of that. And our vision extends not only land, sea, air, underwater, but also up in the heavens with our own bespoke satellite QKD efforts underway also.
I said on the last earnings call of ours in February that this was an incredible strategic and financial inflection point for IonQ. And when I look at World Quantum Day a year ago versus today, I want to celebrate the fact that not only are we delivering strategic advantage for you as our trusted partners and customers, but it's a watershed year for the adoption of quantum, a watershed year for the delivery of advantage, and a watershed year because of the recognition that Q-Day is coming sooner. We are very focused on being your partner across our quantum platform, meeting all of your quantum needs. We are very focused on, as I said, putting you, our trusted partners, first. So please don't be shy about ensuring that we are always over-delivering for you, because we believe we deliver not only tangible advantage and financial advantage, but we deliver strategic advantage for everybody in the room — strategic advantage over your competitors and, in some cases, over geopolitical competitors.
Quantum is now, and I am inspired every day by that video we showed at the start, because it's never been more true on our journey in the last 30 years, in the last six years since our IPO. There are real-world outcomes that are happening. They are happening sometimes on your own volition, sometimes through a partnership. I am hugely inspired by the fact that every year that goes on, we have more and more progress from our customers and partners that they are delivering on their own initiative, and in some cases, I said, outpacing our quantum application team — and I think ours is pretty great, and we're always investing in it. That is a really exciting moment. And when we look back next year on World Quantum Day, I have no doubt that the progress will be exponential, as it has been every year. The progress will be all the more tangible, and the progress will also be about this trusted partnership for those of you in the room and us, to make sure that quantum is meeting your needs, it's meeting them early and often at the right price point with the world's leading time-to-solution and security stack.
