IonQ, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to INQ's second quarter 2023 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero from your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'll turn the conference over to Jordan Shapiro, Vice President, FP&A, and Head of Investor Relations. Jordan, you may now begin.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to IonQ's second quarter 2023 earnings call. My name is Jordan Shapiro, and I'm the vice president of financial planning and analysis and head of investor relations here at IonQ. I am pleased to be joined on today's call by Peter Chapman, our president and chief executive officer, Thomas Kramer, our chief financial officer, and Dr. Jung-Sang Kim, our co-founder and chief technology officer. By now, everyone should have access to the company's second quarter 2023 earnings press release issued this afternoon, which is available on the investor relations section of our website at investors.inq.com. Please note that on today's call, management will refer to adjusted EBITDA, which is a non-GAAP financial measure. While the company believes this non-GAAP financial measure provides useful information for investors, the presentation of this information is not intended be considered in isolation, or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. You are directed to our press release for reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to its closest comparable GAAP measure. During the call, we will discuss our business outlook and make forward-looking statements. These comments are based on management's predictions and expectations as of today. Actual events or results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties including those mentioned in our most recent filings with the SEC. Now, I will turn it over to Peter Chapman, President and CEO of INQ. Peter?

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining our second quarter 2023 earnings call. It's been another outstanding quarter here at INQ as we continue to push ahead and further our lead over our competitors. We finished the quarter with 5.5 million in revenue, which was well above the high end of our guidance range of 4.1 to 4.5 million. At the same time, we built upon our momentum in the private sector by closing our first major deal designed to put not just one, but two generations of future INQ systems in Europe. This commercial milestone brings our year-to-date bookings to 32 million, and puts us in striking range to achieve our previously stated goal of 100 million in cumulative bookings during the first three years of our commercialization efforts. As we'll discuss, this quarter's success gives us the confidence to once again raise the midpoint of our bookings guidance for the full year from our previous outlook of 50 million up to 52.5 million. Our momentum here at INQ is accelerating with our groundbreaking technical progress driving our commercial wins. Last quarter, we shared that our team had already accomplished our technical goal for 2023 over seven months ahead of schedule by achieving a record-breaking 29 algorithmic qubits, or AQ, on our INQ Forte system. We have added approximately one AQ per month on average since going public in September 2021. With AQ29 achieved, we are now focused on reaching AQ35 and AQ64. Building on that technology success, we have now closed IMQ's largest commercial deal to date. In June, we announced that we will be partnering with Quantum Basel, a Switzerland-based industry group, to bring two of our future systems to Europe. These systems will follow our technical roadmap, with the first one expected to reach AQ35, and the second system expected to reach up to AQ64. We plan to use these systems to serve European industry, government entities, and research institutes with local access to INQ's powerful quantum systems. The beauty of this partnership is that as our first planned on-premise hardware project in Europe, we will retain some capacity on each system, allowing us to serve other prospective customers in the region from our new European data center. Our Quantum Basel partnership is significant to INQ in a few ways. First, we noted in prior earnings calls that a large sale could create a significant boost in INQ's near-term bookings. This is such a sale. Additionally, this partnership represents our first deal involving future INQ systems and is a strong third-party validation of INQ's ambitious technical roadmap. Looking forward, at AQ64, INQ quantum computers will be able to explore a useful computational space of 2 to the power of 64 for running quantum algorithms. In a fraction of a second, this system will be able to explore a computational space of 18 quantillion. As a reminder, a quantillion is one with 18 zeros after it. To put that in perspective, the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory can calculate 1.1 quantillion floating point operations per second. At AQ64, classical computers will no longer be able to fully simulate an I&Q system. And as a result, we believe these systems will enable customers to tackle certain problems that even the best classical supercomputers can't solve. We currently expect to deliver AQ64 by the end of 2025. We are committed to achieving quantum advantage and believe we can reach this at AQ64. Though the technical challenges on the road to this goal are significant, our team is pursuing more than one path to arrive at this historic milestone, which enhances our confidence in doing so. While these milestones are just around the corner, we are seeing belief in our roadmap driving tangible commercial adoption for INQ today. We believe INQ is the only public company today that is executing against a roadmap that can deliver these technical results and sell systems in this time period. We are seeing increased demand for INQ systems, and we now hope to sell a number of systems over the next 18 months in various configurations based on customer needs. Our guidance for this year is a probability weighted average of our pipeline, and it already accounts for the 2023 portion of these potential sales. Thomas will provide more details on our guidance later in the call. At Quantum World Congress on September 27th, we will share a more detailed technical roadmap and upcoming product details. We will live stream this presentation, and I encourage anyone interested in learning more about our roadmap or accessing our upcoming systems to use the link in our press release to sign up for the broadcast. Additionally, we are excited to be hosting an Analyst Day from our College Park office next month with presentations that will also be live streamed via our website. Stay tuned to our investor website for more details on registering for the Analyst Day. To prepare customers to use the upcoming systems on our roadmap, we're working with forward-looking groups to help get their workforces and economies ready for Quantum. As an example, we recently signed a memorandum of understanding with South Korea's Ministry of Science, or ICT, to become a core provider of quantum education for Korean students, researchers, and industry professionals. We also had the honor to meet with South Korea's president to discuss how INQ quantum computing might be able to accelerate the nation's economy. We could not be more thrilled to partner with the South Korean government on this initiative. We believe customers across the globe are partnering with INQ, seeking access to our powerful new systems in order to prepare for the potential of our near-term AQ64 systems. In June, we took another step towards broad accessibility of our platform when we announced that INQ Forte and the full power of its AQ29 is available to all our customers worldwide via direct access. Previously, this machine was only available to select partners, but now INQ Forte can be accessed by any of our direct customers. Last week, we published a manuscript with our partners at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on modeling the benzene molecule. Benzene is a commonly used industrial solvent, and its molecular structure is a widely used benchmark to evaluate quantum chemistry algorithms. We believe our work with Oak Ridge represents the most accurate benzene model run on a quantum computer to date. Clearly, we have had another strong quarter as we continue to expand to additional institutions around the world. Last quarter, we delivered on our promise of AQ29 seven months ahead of schedule. And now we have translated that progress to phenomenal bookings growth. We believe INQ has a clear path to scale with buy-in from institutions and corporations around the world. We could not be more optimistic about the future of INQ and quantum computing as a whole. Now I'd like to turn over the call to Thomas for a more detailed review of the numbers. Thomas?