The Quantum Industry
Quantum's Money In Versus Revenue Out, 2026
McKinsey, QED-C, Commerce, Quantinuum's IPO and the filings of IonQ, Rigetti and D-Wave, each with what it counts: why quantum funding totals and revenue cannot be netted, and what the gap between them means.
Gabriele Masetti ·
Two Totals, Two Different Questions
Anyone asking whether quantum computing is a bubble meets two sets of numbers. One set counts money raised: venture rounds, share sales, government commitments. The other counts money earned from customers. They are published by different organisations, built from different databases, and they answer different questions, so the first job is to say what each one counts.
Money in and revenue out cannot be netted against each other, because most of the "money in" is capital that companies raised by selling shares or that governments have promised against milestones. The gap between the two is a measure of how far investors and governments are ahead of the customers. It is a bet on a hardware roadmap, and whether anyone is buying quantum computers today shows up only in revenue.
Every figure is given as its publisher states it, with the date, and none is converted or added to another source's number.
What McKinsey Counts as Investment
McKinsey & Company published its Quantum Technology Monitor 2026 in April 2026, with data collection ending in March 2026. Its headline is that total investment in quantum technology start-ups rose about 6.3 times, to $12.6 billion in 2025 from $2 billion in 2024. The report's footnote defines the total: investment data recorded in PitchBook, covering private markets (venture funding and corporate investments), public markets (IPOs, SPACs, secondary public offerings and PIPEs), and government and university funding.
McKinsey adds that actual investment is likely higher and that data on start-up investment in China is limited.
The composition matters more than the headline. According to the report, private investment rose more than nine-fold between 2024 and 2025, driven mainly by capital markets, which account for 44% of private investment, and private funds, at 34%. Government and institutional funding fell slightly to about $350 million, roughly half of its 2024 level, and made up only 3% of the 2025 total.
The report's own top-ten deal table shows what "capital markets" means in practice. The largest 2025 entry is an IonQ public offering of $1,535 million, labelled "Public investment 2nd offering", and a second IonQ offering of $786 million ranks fourth. McKinsey says the ten largest deals were valued at about $7.6 billion combined, about 60% of total deal value in 2025. A figure of that kind reflects a few listed companies selling shares into a rising market.
What the Quantum Economic Development Consortium Counts
A second publisher reached a different picture. The Quantum Economic Development Consortium (QED-C) released its State of the Global Quantum Industry 2026 report on 14 April 2026, with data current as of the end of 2025. It reports private venture capital of $4.9 billion in 2025, more than double the previous record. McKinsey's $12.6 billion, almost all of it private, and QED-C's $4.9 billion both describe money going into quantum companies in the same year, yet they differ because McKinsey includes public-market offerings and QED-C reports venture capital.
On public money, QED-C says global public funding commitments for quantum research and innovation increased by more than $12.7 billion over the year, reaching an estimated $56.7 billion in total. The word is commitments, meaning a budget line that a government has announced, and it can be spent over many years and on national laboratories, universities and programmes that are not companies at all.
The two publishers count different things. McKinsey counts what start-ups raised, and only about $350 million of that was government and institutional. QED-C counts what governments have pledged across the field. Adding $12.6 billion to $12.7 billion would double-count some money and mix raised capital with pledged capital, so no combined figure appears here.
What Revenue Looks Like
On the earning side, McKinsey reports that the revenue of quantum computing companies was more than $1 billion in 2025, and estimates a range of $3.2 billion to $4.4 billion in 2028. Its chart shows 2024 at $0.7 billion to $1.0 billion and 2025 at $1.1 billion to $1.4 billion. These are estimates built from expert interviews, a press search and McKinsey's analysis, not audited accounts.
QED-C measures the market instead of company revenue. It puts the global quantum market in 2025 at $1.9 billion, made up of quantum computing at $1.4 billion and quantum sensing at $470 million. It expects the computing segment to reach about $3 billion by 2028, growing roughly 30% a year.
Both publishers land in the low single-digit billions for 2025 and a few billion for 2028. Set against $12.6 billion raised by start-ups in the same year, according to McKinsey, the order-of-magnitude gap is plain. The caution is that the two sides use different definitions and different companies, so it should be read as a scale.
Three Listed Companies, From Their Own Releases
Public companies report on a fixed schedule under securities rules, which makes them the most reliable view of revenue. All three below reported second-quarter 2026 results on 5 or 6 August 2026.
IonQ reported revenue of $80.1 million for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, up 287% year over year, and raised its full-year 2026 guidance to $280 million to $290 million, excluding any contribution from SkyWater Technology, whose acquisition closed on 31 July. Its GAAP net loss was $1,867.7 million, or $5.08 per share. Quantum Computing Report attributes about $1.65 billion of that to a non-cash revaluation of warrant liabilities, and IonQ's own release reports an adjusted EBITDA loss of $120.3 million.
Cash, equivalents and investments stood at $3.0 billion, or about $2.0 billion pro forma after the SkyWater deal.
Rigetti Computing reported quarterly revenue of $5.1 million against $1.8 million a year earlier, and six-month revenue of $9.5 million against $3.3 million. Its operating loss for the quarter was $28.1 million, its GAAP net loss $52.6 million, and its cash, cash equivalents and available-for-sale investments $541.3 million. Coverage of the results ties the revenue to on-premises Novera quantum processing unit purchase orders.
D-Wave Quantum reported second-quarter revenue of $3.1 million, essentially flat on the prior year, and first-half revenue of $5.9 million, down 67% from a first half that included a large one-time system sale. Its net loss was $48.0 million for the quarter, and cash and marketable securities were $546.2 million. Bookings, which are orders not yet recognised as revenue, were $35.5 million for the first half, including a $20 million system sale.
What the Pattern in Those Filings Shows
Two features recur. First, revenue is lumpy because it comes from a small number of large orders. D-Wave's first half fell 67% because one big system sale was in the comparison period, and its latest large sale sits in bookings, awaiting recognition. Rigetti's growth rests on specific purchase orders for on-premises machines. A single customer decision can move a quarter.
Second, cash balances are large relative to quarterly revenue, and they came from capital markets. IonQ's $3.0 billion, Rigetti's $541.3 million and D-Wave's $546.2 million, each as reported at 30 June 2026, come largely from share sales of the kind McKinsey counts in its investment total. The companies are spending that cash on research and, in IonQ's case, acquisitions. The operating losses are the cost of that spending, and net results swing by hundreds of millions on non-cash warrant revaluations that have nothing to do with customers.
The listed companies are funded for years of building before revenue can pay for it, which is the situation an investor in any pre-commercial hardware business accepts.
Quantinuum's Listing
Quantinuum's initial public offering is the clearest case of capital running ahead of revenue. Its press release of 3 June 2026 priced an upsized offering of 28 million Class A shares at $60.00, with trading on the Nasdaq Global Market under QNT from 4 June. A second release dated 5 June reported gross proceeds of $1.68 billion before underwriting discounts and expenses.
The prospectus on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission gives the other side. Quantinuum's net revenue was $30.9 million in 2025 against $23.0 million in 2024, and its net loss was $192.6 million against $144.1 million. For the three months ended 31 March 2026 it reported net revenue of $5.2 million and a net loss of $136.6 million, compared with $19.1 million and $30.5 million a year earlier. Bookings were $79.3 million for 2025 and $1.3 million for the first quarter of 2026.
The drop in first-quarter revenue shows the same lumpiness as D-Wave's. A single quarter's revenue is a weak guide to a hardware company, and bookings, which are signed orders, were small in that quarter too. The subject here is what the company reported, with no view on the share price.
Washington Takes Equity
The third source of capital is the US government. On 21 May 2026 the Department of Commerce announced nine letters of intent to provide $2.013 billion in federal incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act. Two went to foundries: GlobalFoundries at $375 million and IBM at $1 billion in planned funding. Seven went to quantum computing companies: Atom Computing, D-Wave, Infleqtion, PsiQuantum and Quantinuum at $100 million each, Rigetti at up to $100 million, and Diraq at up to $38 million.
Two features set this apart from a grant. The release states that the Department will receive a minority, non-controlling equity stake in each company as a condition for the funds, "to enhance the return for the U.S. taxpayer". And as of May 2026, these were letters of intent for planned funding, not paid-out awards. Anyone citing the $2.013 billion should say that it is a package of planned awards, and check the Commerce record for which have since been finalised.
With today's CHIPS Research and Development investments in quantum computing, the Trump administration is leading the world into a new era of American innovation. — Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce, U.S. Department of Commerce
The equity structure also links the public and private ledgers. For a listed recipient, the money would be capital rather than customer revenue, and the government becomes a shareholder as well as a funder.
Layers of Capital Against Revenue
Read together, the sources describe three layers of capital: share sales and venture rounds that start-ups and listed companies raised, government commitments announced across the field, and a new category of state equity tied to manufacturing and engineering milestones. Against them stands revenue that two publishers put in the low billions for 2025, and company filings that show it arriving in uneven chunks.
The gap is explained by the timeline the companies publish. Quantinuum's own published roadmap targets universal fault-tolerant computing by the end of the decade, so today's revenue comes from research customers, early adopters and buyers of smaller systems, while the capital pays for the fault-tolerant machines to come. Investors and governments are underwriting the date, and revenue figures cannot say whether the date will hold.
For a reader, the useful discipline is to ask three questions of any quantum number. Who published it, and on what date? What does it count: raised capital, pledged funds, bookings or recognised revenue? And does it come from a filing or from an estimate? A headline that sets $12.6 billion beside $1 billion without those answers compares two different things.
The measurable signals for the coming quarters are specific: whether recognised revenue catches up with bookings at D-Wave, how much of IonQ's guidance comes from acquisitions, which Commerce letters become final awards, and whether Quantinuum's reported revenue and bookings rise from their first-quarter level. Each of them can be read straight from the next filing.