What actually printed
The Q1 2026 reports landed on May 12 and ran through the end of the week. Taken on their own, the headline numbers are the strongest collective performance the public quantum pure-plays have delivered.
D-Wave reported $33.4 million in Q1 bookings, up nearly two thousand percent year-over-year, alongside an announced acquisition of Quantum Circuits Inc. that marks the company's first formal step into gate-model error correction. Rigetti delivered its 108-qubit Ankaa-3 system to general availability and won a £100 million commitment from the United Kingdom to deploy a 1,000+ qubit system on British soil by 2028. IonQ reported Q1 revenue of $64.7 million (+755 percent year-over-year) and raised FY26 guidance to $260-270 million. Quantum Computing Inc. reported revenue growth of roughly 9,000 percent year-over-year, dominated by post-acquisition consolidation rather than organic growth, while operating losses widened.
On the private side, Photonic Inc. closed a $200 million round at a $2 billion valuation. Nord Quantique closed a Fidelity-led round at a $1.4 billion mark. Both are clean private markups that landed inside the same reporting window.
By any read, this is a constructive quarter for the sector. Bookings are accelerating. Government wins are concrete. Private capital is still flowing into late-stage names at premium marks. The public-market response was to sell every pure-play on the tape, with QBTS leading the decline at -8.9 percent in ourMay 14 snapshot.
That is the question that defines the rest of 2026 for these names. Why did a collectively constructive cycle clear nobody?
Bookings growth is no longer a positive surprise
The simplest framing is that the multiples themselves are the problem. IonQ trades at roughly 150 times trailing sales. Rigetti is closer to 700 times. D-Wave at 300 times. Quantum Computing Inc., on the post-consolidation revenue base, at roughly 890 times. These are not multiples that survive Q1 beats. They are multiples that price perfect execution against a future revenue ramp that hasn't happened yet.
At those multiples, a 755 percent revenue print is the base case. A 2,000 percent bookings print is the base case. A new sovereign customer is the base case. The print can match those expectations and the multiple still has to come down, because the discount rate on a multi-year compounding revenue series is mechanically high when the cohort trades at three-digit price-to-sales. Time alone is the headwind.
What would move the multiples up is what isn't in the prints: gross margin expansion, operating leverage, capital return, or a credible path to GAAP profitability. None of these are in any 2026 pure-play guide. The cohort is running the playbook the multiples already priced. The only way to grow into the multiples is to exceed them. The Q1 cycle didn't.
The buy-side rotation is real
The second framing is structural. Over the last six months, public-market quantum capital has been migrating out of pure-plays and into quantum optionality plays inside large-cap incumbents. IBM, Microsoft, Google, Honeywell-Quantinuum (post spin), and even Nvidia are now treated by the buy side as legitimate quantum exposure with the added comfort of a real balance sheet.
The reason this matters is that the marginal dollar of quantum exposure is moving. When an institutional allocator wants quantum in the book today, the analytically defensible position is no longer a 1 percent position in IONQ. It is a 4 percent position in MSFT with a thesis that includes Azure Quantum and the topological qubit roadmap. The diversification is identical at the basket level, the duration is shorter, the volatility is lower, and the optionality on a working quantum machine is preserved. The mathematical case for owning a pure-play has been getting weaker for two years. The Q1 prints did nothing to reverse that.
This is a durable trade because it's rational. The pure-play premium needed to compensate the holder for the binary architecture risk has compressed because the incumbents are no longer behind on the architecture. IBM's qLDPC demonstration with Bravyi et al. was the moment the buy side stopped thinking of large-caps as quantum laggards. Microsoft's topological qubit announcement (whatever its eventual outcome) was the moment they stopped underwriting the pure-plays' near-monopoly on the narrative. The pure-plays haven't recovered from either.
The private mark spread
The most interesting datum in the Q1 cycle is the spread between private marks and public marks. Photonic Inc. printed a 2 billion mark in private. Nord Quantique printed 1.4 billion. The closest public comp for either of these is somewhere in the Rigetti-to-Atom range, where the public market is paying meaningfully less per unit of forward revenue or per unit of physical qubit. That spread is the new arbitrage in the sector.
Mathematically the spread cannot last. Either the private marks come down or the public marks rerate up. Our view is that the private marks come down first. The late-stage growth funds that are still deploying into quantum at premium marks are doing so against an LP universe that benchmarks them quarterly. The first secondary trade that prints below the most recent mark sets the new floor.
We are already seeing the first signs of this in adjacent sectors. AI infrastructure names that closed at fifty-times-forward revenue in 2024 are secondary-trading at thirty-times in 2026. Quantum is on the same curve, with a twelve to eighteen month lag. The names whose latest primary mark is most disconnected from the public comps are the first ones at risk.
Implications for LP-fund exposure
For Caruso Ventures and for our peers in family-office quantum exposure, this is the implication that matters. We are moving our private quantum positions to a quarterly mark-to-public methodology for internal reporting. The methodology is simple: for each private quantum holding, identify the two closest public comps, apply the median price-to-sales multiple to the holding's forward revenue, and use that as the marking input alongside the lead investor's most recent primary round.
This is conservative. It probably understates the value of architectures that the public market hasn't yet figured out how to comp (photonic, neutral atom). It probably overstates the discount for architectures that the public market has penalized too aggressively (silicon-spin in particular). But it captures the direction of the spread, and it gets internal reporting ahead of the eventual external repricing.
For LPs reading this who have quantum exposure through growth funds or secondaries, our recommendation is to ask your managers to publish a similar methodology. Any manager whose marks haven't moved in the last two quarters has a question to answer.
What the prints do mean
Nothing in this thesis says the underlying businesses are bad. D-Wave's bookings growth is a genuine operational milestone and signals customer pull in optimization use cases. Rigetti's 108-qubit GA and the UK win are the strongest external validations the company has ever received. IonQ's revenue ramp is real and the customer base diversification is the cleanest in the public cohort. These businesses are executing. They are simply executing against valuations that priced this execution two years ago.
The right way to hold quantum exposure for the next eighteen months, in our view, is mostly through private positions with realistic carrying values and through incumbent optionality on the public side. The pure-play names are the worst risk- adjusted instrument in the trade today. They are the right instrument for traders playing the IPO catalyst calendar around Quantinuum and for binary believers in specific architectures. They are the wrong instrument for institutional exposure.
The counterargument
The case against this thesis has three serious forms.
One. The Quantinuum IPO will lift everyone. If the book prices above $16 billion and the aftermarket holds, the comp basis for every other pure-play resets up. This is real and we hold it as the primary thing that invalidates the thesis. It is conditional on a specific IPO outcome that hasn't happened. If it happens, we revisit.
Two. The cohort always sells the print and rallies later. There is some historical support for this. The 2023 and 2024 prints in IONQ specifically tended to sell off into the close and rally into the next earnings. The 2025-2026 prints have not followed the pattern. The difference is that expectations have risen faster than execution, and the rally-into-next-earnings setup requires expectations to have room to rise. They no longer do.
Three. Rate-cycle dynamics are dominant and quantum is just along for the ride. Partially true. Quantum is among the highest-duration equity buckets in the public market. Any tightening of the discount-rate environment will compress multiples faster than fundamentals. But the cohort has underperformed the long- duration tech basket for two quarters running, which suggests something cohort- specific is also happening. The rate cycle accelerated the move; it didn't originate it.
What we're watching
The Quantinuum IPO is the primary catalyst. Pricing above $16 billion with a clean aftermarket invalidates the multiple-compression base case for the sector. Pricing below $14 billion confirms it. Anything between is ambiguous and the secondary tape over the following month becomes the read.
The Q2 reporting cycle is the second test. We are looking for sequential margin expansion at IonQ specifically, given the operating leverage embedded in the $260-270 million FY26 guide. We are looking for whether D-Wave's +2,000 percent bookings convert to a similarly-magnitude revenue recognition print in Q2 or whether the booking-to-revenue gap reveals customer concentration that the market hasn't fully priced.
The third test is the private mark cycle. If Photonic Inc. or Nord Quantique print follow-on rounds in the next two quarters at higher marks, the private faith is real and the public-private spread is sustainable for another beat. If either trades in secondary below the recent primary mark, the rerate starts.
Disclosure
Connor Reuter runs Quantum Ledger. He is an investor at Caruso Ventures, a Single Family Office. As of publication, Caruso Ventures has no direct equity positions in IonQ, D-Wave, Rigetti, Quantum Computing Inc., or Arqit. Caruso Ventures has indirect exposure to private quantum names through growth-stage fund commitments including PsiQuantum and several Stage A QBI vendors. Views expressed are the author's and do not constitute investment advice.
The Ledger publishes one signed essay each week, plus the daily brief at six in the morning Mountain. For the live cohort view referenced above, see the company directory; the QNT IPO Watch tracks the Quantinuum pricing process referenced as the primary catalyst; the Ledger Score is the underlying scoring framework that supports the rankings used in this essay.