Quantum Computing Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, greetings and welcome to the Quantum Computing Inc. 3rd Quarter 2024 Shareholder Update Call. Following management's remarks, the call lines will be open for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad at any time. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Rosalind Christian, with IMS Investor Relations.

Thank you. And I want to welcome everyone to the Quantum Computing Inc shareholder update call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this conference call may contain forward looking statements based on our current expectations and projections regarding future events and are subject to change based on various important factors. In light of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions, you should not place undue reliance on these forward looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this call. For more details on factors that could affect these expectations, please see our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. On the call today, we have Dr. William McGann, CEO of QCI, and Chris Bemler, CFO. Bill will provide an update on business, followed by a question and answer session hosted by both Bill and Chris. With that, I would like to turn the call over to management. Please go ahead, Bill.

Thank you, Rosalind, and thank you, everyone, for joining our call today. So this is going to be the first of what I hope and expect will be many quarterly investor calls to come as we continue to grow our business and communicate our strategies to the world. And I'm personally really excited to take the opportunity to discuss the strategic progress we've made today with you. Before we get into the specific operational details of those achievements, I wanted to address some of the broader context under which QCI is operating. So to start with, you know, I always start by saying, look, we're a nanophotonics company that leverages novel materials and their associated nonlinear quantum optical properties to design, develop, and deliver innovative hardware solutions for high-performance computing, AI machine learning, and applications in remote sensing. We capsulize all that, because that's a lot, by saying we put photons to work, because this singular core technology focus gives us the ability to address multiple revenue streams as those markets begin to emerge. And based on this approach, we believe we're very well positioned to capitalize on what we call our early flexible, early mover advantage in emerging markets and rapidly growing ones. the increasing global focus on sustainable energy solutions, coupled to the push for advanced technology innovation in sectors such as automotive, finance, and healthcare, really starts to underscore the timely relevance of our offerings and showcases and the powerful diversity of our core technology, which I'm going to talk to you about today. So, additional to that, as you might imagine, there are also political drivers, including governmental support for quantum technology and initiatives aimed at fostering innovation across that are really creating quite a favorable environment for us right now. And our goal here is to establish what I call a best-in-class sustainable use case strategy for energy management and automotive applications and for the important portfolio, financial portfolio optimization. These align very well with the trends of our business and allow us for a focused commitment for us to deliver high-margin revenue streams from our quantum machines and our US-based foundry services, which we're gonna talk to you about today. So I want to provide a thumbnail of a couple of these really important areas to focus that we're addressing the critical challenges of energy consumption in AI and powerful quantum machines for solving complex optimization problems. Our product development roadmap and growth model will be sustained by leveraging one common core technology to capture multiple revenue streams in these complementary markets, all of which will benefit from the next generation of our photonic high-performance computation. So it ties really well with our roadmap here. The underlying technology element that enables this approach is our model for nanofabrication of QCI photonic chips using thin-film lithium niobate, or TFLN. We call it TFLN for short because it's really hard to say thin-film lithium niobate three times fast in a sentence. But this Tiflin material is the source material that QCI uses for developing its quantum high-performance computing machines. And importantly, Tiflin is also becoming recognized as one of the most promising new materials for implementation of extremely low-power consumption devices for the really widely expanding and rapidly growing telecom and data center applications. I mean, recently at a conference where we attended, one of the head spokespeople for NVIDIA, for example, stood up and said that thin lithium niobate is one of the most being looked at for its promise in these applications. So we think, again, it aligns with our strategy very well. So in the near term, we're going to leverage the growing demand for Tiflin devices in the market to drive early significant revenues for foundry services, while we will in parallel keep on developing along the same path of our own quantum computing machine platform. So the punchline is really this. We believe it is best approach for us achieving scalable quantum machines, and the immediate result of this approach will be to leverage the early cash flow that we generate from the foundry services in Arizona and the large growing market that it will command to drive the high-performance quantum machine adoption in the markets where the development is still emerging and a little bit more technology maturing is needed. So ultimately, this approach back and forth Leveraging the technology in the markets will produce miniaturized photonic integrated circuits. They're called PICs is a term of art. And our TFLN chips will become the integral part of that scalable photonic quantum machine that will meet the extreme performance demands in these markets, as you all are following. I'm sure you know that. One really important benefit that's immediately available for our growth in market share is that our systems operate at room temperature and they are mountable in a rack in an ordinary server room configuration. Our current Dirac 3 machine is already in these configurations showing great advantages in solving important computational benchmark problems and operating with exceedingly low powers in the range of 25 watts or the equivalent of two LED light bulbs. I mean, it's impressive what these machines can do with such low levels of power. Today, I'm confident to state that the Dirac 3 offers the best size, weight, power, and cost of any high-performance computer in the world today. size, weight, power, and cost we refer to as Swamp C. This fact enables us to provide these powerful machines at a very low cost, and it makes our accessible, affordable strategy that some of you may have heard us talk about be a reality versus an idea. So now let me highlight a few of the specific operational achievements for Q3 during the third quarter. So first I want to go back and discuss our specific progress with the thin-film lithium-naobate or Tiflin foundry in Tempe, Arizona. We are in the final phase of commissioning the facility, and we remain on track to begin the production early in 2025. And we've already begun finalizing offtake agreements and some pre-sales orders with new customers and strategic partners. You've probably seen that in some of our recent press releases. This foundry is a really significant step in scaling our manufacturing capabilities and expanding our reach into these new markets, as I've described above. And this is a tangible result of our efforts to improve the execution of our sales and marketing strategy. Another really key element this quarter is that we extended our Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, or CRADA, with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, LANL. This renewed collaboration allows us to further explore the capabilities of our new Direct3 machine for quantum optimization problems. And the extended agreement facilitates the development of advanced quantum solutions across other important sectors, including energy management, molecular dynamics, and even some really fascinating quantum chemistry problems important to the world. So additionally, You know, we're really trying to leverage these technology advancements with market opportunity through our presence in the key industry events, including things like Quantum World Congress in 24 and the Quantum Tech Europe, which we've been giving paper presentations at. And this has been very instrumental in raising our awareness about the capabilities of our Dirac-3 platform. These engagements have really elevated our profile among government and commercial stakeholders and really sparking interest in potential partnerships that we anticipate will continue to further enhance and grow our position. So, in parallel, all these efforts working together, we continue to develop that underlying entropy quantum computing solution, our Direct3. And it is gaining traction demonstrated through solving these benchmark problems. And we're working with people like the Los Alamos National Labs, as I mentioned, Oak Ridge National Labs, and Berkeley National Labs, Lawrence Berkeley. And these studies underscore our platform's efficiency in tackling these challenges. So lastly, and I'll probably stop at that point, is I'm happy to announce that the subsequent, in this quarter, we secured our fifth project with NASA. And this exciting new contract continues our focus on developing quantum technology for space-borne LIDAR missions, light detection and ranging applications. And these are specifically aimed at lowering the cost associated with space-borne LIDAR from billions of dollars per flight to millions of dollars and focused on gathering climate monitoring data and enhancing the data collection capabilities. This contract further, you know, really solidifies that partnership that we've had ongoing with NASA, and it reflects our commitment to them and them to us on leveraging our technology for real-world applications. So, I look forward to questions and answers, but for now, I'm going to pass over to Chris, my CFO, Chris Bemler, for a quick look at our financial performance. Over to you, Chris.