IonQ, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the IonQ First Quarter 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. Should you require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero to signal an operator. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Jordan Shapiro, Vice President, Financial Planning and Analysis, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to INQ's first quarter 2024 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 INQ. I'm pleased to be joined on today's call by Peter Chapman, INQ's President and Chief Executive Officer, Thomas Kramer, our Chief Financial Officer, and Dr. Dean Kassman, our Vice President of Engineering. By now, everyone should have access to the company's first quarter 2024 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 advice for investors, the presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. We are directed to our press release for a 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 our beliefs as of today. Actual events or results could differ materially from the outlook and other forward-looking statements due to a number of risks and uncertainties. including those mentioned in our 10-Q filing with the SEC this week. We undertake no obligation to revise any statements to reflect changes that occur after this call, except as required by law. Now, I will turn it over to Peter Chapman, President and CEO of IonQ. Peter?

Thanks, Jordan, and thanks again to everyone for joining us today. I am very pleased with our results for this quarter. There is a lot to discuss during our call, but the four key takeaways are as follows. INQ started 2024 by exceeding the high end of our revenue guidance range. Specifically, we delivered $7.6 million in revenue relative to our range of $6.5 to $7.5 million that we discussed in our most recent call. With the US federal budget passed and continued interest from customers in quantum computing and quantum networking, we are raising our bookings guidance for the year. We booked 250,000 in the first quarter and our current pipeline is stronger than ever. Between our work with customers and our internal research, INQ is making serious headway towards identifying the first potential production applications of quantum computing. INQ operations continue to gain momentum. Our Seattle manufacturing facility is now fully operational and we are already building the first production INQ Forte enterprise system that has been sold to a customer. Meanwhile, between new board members, executives, and team members, INQ continues to hire the leading minds in the quantum computing space. Let's walk through each area in more detail. First on revenue, INQs continue to outperform financially. exceeding the high end of revenue guidance range by bringing in $7.6 million last quarter. This marks the 10th quarter that we have outperformed our quarterly revenue midpoint since going public in 2021. We attribute this beat to outstanding execution by our technical delivery team, which has allowed us to accelerate the progress on deliverables towards our contracts. Given that these great results reflect the acceleration of existing contracts, we are maintaining our full-year revenue guidance. We remain highly confident in our revenue performance and will continue to update the market on our full-year outlook during our quarterly earnings call. In our last call, we mentioned that our bookings guidance was impacted due to the uncertainty around the approval of the U.S. 2024 federal budget. With at-risk now passed, we believe that we've identified in excess of $50 million of federal opportunities in 2024 not related to system sales. And on the system sales side, we are currently planning to build five Forte Enterprise systems in this production run. One of the five has already been sold to Quantum Basel. We are in various stages of engagement for the remaining four. After this Forte enterprise production run, we plan to swiftly turn our attention to manufacturing tempos, the first of which has also been sold to Quantum Basel. Our sales pipeline is expanding significantly across multiple countries, government agencies, and industries, and is at an all-time high, giving us even more confidence in INQ's near and medium-term financial prospects and growth trajectory. All of this leads us to raise our bookings guidance for the year to a range of $75 million to $95 million. We are excited at this prospect of achieving that unprecedented level of sales. Next, for our third topic, I wanted to shed some light on why there are divergent points of view in the question of when quantum computing will take off. There is one camp within the quantum industry who believes that fault-tolerant quantum computing and millions of qubits are required, and by extension, still years away. Our opinion, and that of others, is that within the NISQ era, applications can be found that can provide commercial advantage in large markets. We have had our application team looking at applications that will run on our near-term, next-generation systems that meet that requirement. We now have several application areas that look extremely promising. These applications, if we are able to achieve them, have the potential to be game changers in their respective markets. This has been the allure of quantum from its inception. One in particular that I am personally excited by is the pharmaceutical space, an industry with the ability to change lives for the better for everyone. Earlier today, I published my yearly letter to shareholders, which I hope you'll take a few minutes to review on the INQ blog. The letter also discusses commercial advantage, the term we use to describe our goal of building and enabling production-ready applications for quantum computing. Commercial advantage is defined through the eyes of our customers and their preference to choose a quantum-based solution over any other alternative. This is about the practical results that all of our research and development unlocks and being laser-focused on building systems that are purchased by customers to deliver real-world commercial value. We were excited to have Dr. Martin Rodeler, our new head of applications, join INQ in March. Martin spent the last 10 years as a leader of Microsoft quantum application efforts. With Martin's leadership, and our deep bench of applications talent, we believe the future looks bright for INQ, delivering commercial advantage to our customers. Lastly, I want to spend a few minutes sharing some of our corporate announcements that continue to inspire confidence in INQ for myself and our team. The first is that we're fully delivering on the promise of our Seattle manufacturing facility. The facility is up and running and we're currently manufacturing our first INQ Forte enterprise system that will get shipped to a customer. At the same time, we're standing up additional infrastructure to manufacture more INQ systems at scale and are leveraging the facility for cutting edge research and development as well. We now have nearly 100 employees located in the Seattle area. Meanwhile, we have almost completed construction of our new data center in Basel, Switzerland, which you may remember is key to our delivery on our $28 million quantum Basel contract that we signed last year. We have INQ team members on the ground in Switzerland and already assembling components for our first system in this new INQ Europe data center. That facility will be key for servicing our growing EMEA customer base. While our headquarters in College Park, Maryland, and the ecosystem we've helped build in the greater DC area remain our commercial and technological epicenter, we are very happy with the company's progress on national and international expansion. We are also strengthening our ranks at INQ. You may remember that we announced in the first quarter the addition of two new industry export board members, Robert Cardillo, the former Director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency under President Obama, and Bill Scannell, President of Global Sales and Customer Operations at Dell Technologies, where he oversees 24,000 sales team members. More recently, we announced the addition of our new Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary, Stacey Yamilis. Stacey has served as the Chief Legal Counsel of six companies in a variety of technology sectors over the last two decades. She has an extensive track record and deep understanding of the legal aspects of the technology sector, making her the ideal candidate to help scale INQ's operations. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Thomas for a more detailed review of the financials. Thomas?