Peter Chapman
Analyst · Needham & Company. Please go ahead with your question
Thank you, Jordan. Good afternoon everyone. And thank you for joining us for our fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings call. On a technical and financial level, IonQ had a fantastic year. We believe that we are the leader among the pure-play quantum computing companies and we are highly confident in IonQ having a bright future ahead. For the fourth quarter, we generated $3.8 million of revenue and for the full year we generated $11.1 million. Both revenue numbers exceed the high end of the guidance from our last earnings call. Additionally, for the full year, we secured $24.5 million in bookings, an increase of about 50% from 2021. In a few minutes, I will turn the call over to Thomas to provide more details on our 2022 financials and our 2023 outlook. Before diving into the updates from this quarter, I want to take a moment to highlight IonQ’s impressive trajectory and current position in the rapidly evolving quantum market. Two years ago in advance of our 2021 public listing, we published an ambitious plan of financial and technical milestones for the future years. Having wrapped up 2022, I am proud to say that we've exceeded our original bookings targets in both years and have tracked closely to our technical plans even hitting our technical performance milestone last year, six weeks ahead of schedule. IonQ is trailblazing even in spite of the current market conditions. We have seen current market conditions impact many industries and even some of our peers, but IonQ, we see no signs of slowing down. Our customers and prospects continue to demonstrate enthusiasm about working with IonQ. Meanwhile, our technical and company-building efforts are moving forward at full speed bolstering IonQ’s position as our front runner in our industry, we believe we are the most well capitalized, pure-play quantum computing company by leaps and bounds. We believe we have enough cash to get the company to profitability based on our current roadmap and our focus is driving to quantum advantage and advancing the development of applications that leverage our technological edge. With that context allow me to share the latest details of our progress at IonQ. First, I’m thrilled to welcome two exceptional leaders who joined our team over the last few months. In late 2022, Rima Alameddine joined IonQ as our Chief Revenue Officer; and Wendy Thomas, the President and CEO of Secureworks, was appointed to the IonQ Board of Directors. Both Rima and Wendy bring a wealth of expertise and experience and we look forward to the valuable contributions they will make towards IonQ’s continued success. As Chief Revenue Officer, Rima will spearhead IonQ’s expanding sales and revenue division, working with current and future clients to use quantum solutions to solve some of the world's most complex problems. Rima joins us after nearly seven years at Nvidia as the Vice President of Enterprise Sales for the Americas across multiple industries. Prior to Nvidia, Rima spent 18 years at Cisco where she led the company's New York enterprise sales business. With Rima at the helm we expect that our go-to-market team will continue to innovate on behalf of customers. As I mentioned, our technical accomplishments were just as impressive as our financial accomplishments in 2022. Our team successfully executed against our technical roadmap ahead of schedule to deliver our record-breaking system performance of 25 algorithmic qubits by our Q3 earnings call. We continue to believe that IonQ is the only commercial quantum computing company with this superior level of performance, which gives us a head start in enabling real world use cases for customers. What's more? We have made this technology broadly accessible by offering our IonQ Aria system on Microsoft Azure. We are also experiencing rapid growth in our user base, which has led to a surge of inquiries from potential customers about the transformative potential of quantum computing. At IonQ, we are witnessing the convergence of two powerful trends, the rapid advancement of quantum hardware and the increasing efficiency of quantum algorithms. This convergence is driving us towards unprecedented advancements in the development of commercially viable applications of quantum computing and we are at the forefront of this transformation. We believe that quantum machine learning or QML will emerge as one of the most robust and practical applications of quantum computing in the coming years. Machine learning involves searching vast amounts of data to find a statistical best fit answer. Quantum computers can be harnessed to efficiently explore many dimensional spaces, even with the small number of variables making them ideal for machine learning tasks. Even with smaller scale systems, quantum machine learning models can be trained to recognize complicated structures more efficiently than classical computers. We recently announced that our partnership with Hyundai Motor Company to use QML for autonomous vehicles is yielding impressive results. As previously reported by using QML instead of classical ML for road sign detection, we were able to reduce modeling complexity by several orders of magnitude, while maintaining similar accuracy to classical equivalents, even with challenging real life situations such as processing images with low resolution, low contrast, and over exposure. Building on this success, we are now applying similar QML techniques to more complex 3D object detection. We are confident that our QML based autonomous driving solutions can contribute to the development of safer and more reliable transportation technology in the future. Additionally, on the QML front, you may remember that we provided an update on using QML for natural language processing in our Q3 earnings call well before the recent uptick in dialogue about generative AI. Today we are excited to share the latest work from IonQ, which will be published in the coming weeks in a peer-reviewed academic journal. Our team has successfully designed and run the first ever quantum circuits that can simulate well-known human cognitive biases, such as how the order of questions on a survey impacts the participants' answers. This work paves the way for new possibilities in natural language processing beyond the capability of classical computers. We envision this bias model becoming a key component in the development of highly effective AI-enabled chatbots in the future. Our advancements in quantum applications are not constrained to QML. We are also making strides in quantum chemistry. Considering our efforts with Hyundai to optimize battery chemistry, in the past, we shared our quantum simulations for lithium oxide molecules. We were able to successfully run the largest correlated quantum chemistry simulation on quantum hardware to date. The results of this work were shared with the public in the fourth quarter. We believe this work is groundbreaking in the field of quantum computing, demonstrating the immense potential for quantum simulation to tackle some of the most pressing challenges in material science. Today we are collaborating on modeling more complex electrochemical reactions, underlying energy storage mechanisms. This cutting edge work will facilitate the development of top of the line energy storage solutions that are more efficient, longer lasting, and more sustainable than ever before. In another quantum chemistry initiative, we collaborated with Accenture and the Irish Centre for High-End Computing to create a scalable chemistry simulation platform. Specifically, the tool we built focuses on breaking down human-made carcinogens in the environment. Today's cutting-edge chemical analysis tools are computationally expensive and limited in scale, restricting the accuracy and scope of compounds that can be studied. By using IonQ quantum computers, which are naturally suited for chemistry simulations, we have a line of sight to cheaper and broader chemical analysis, which could help us to one day eliminate harmful chemicals contributing to environmental pollution. These applications are all being accomplished with IonQ Aria, a system with 25 algorithmic qubits or AQ. We are already at work on our next milestone of achieving 29 AQ this year, which will allow our technology to tackle greater challenges. For governments, enterprises, developers and investors we believe the time to engage with quantum is today. I mentioned that the convergence of quantum hardware and application development is accelerating timelines for commercial usefulness of our systems. We are firm believers that this trend will continue. It's this convergence that drove our acquisition of Entangled Networks announced earlier this year. Based in Toronto, Entangled Networks focuses on developing technology that optimizes execution of algorithms on quantum computers. There are several ways in which we believe the acquisition of the team and assets will accelerate our work at IonQ. In the near term we expect the team's compiler technology will improve the efficiency of algorithms running on existing IonQ Systems. Secondly, as we begin to build systems with multiple cores on a single chip or multiple chips linked together in a single system, Entangled Networks expertise will help us determine how to optimize algorithms across those configurations and design future hardware architectures. With increasing customer engagements and the prospect of commercially relevant use cases insight, we have been laser focused on improving the manufacturability of our systems. This quarter, we announced plans to build the country's first dedicated quantum computing manufacturing facility in Bothell, Washington, situated near Seattle. Our R&D and manufacturing teams will work together here to develop and assemble quantum computers to fulfill projected customer demand, expanding multiple floors and covering 65,000 square feet the new facility is situated in a thriving technology and innovation hub with ample hardware and software talent. It will also serve as our second quantum data center and our first on the West Coast. We announced the plans for this facility with strong public support from the Washington State Congressional Delegation including U.S. Senate President pro tempore Patty Murray support for IonQ's goal of creating the world's best quantum computers extends to the highest echelons of the U.S. government. And with that I'll turn the call over to Thomas for a more detailed review of our financials. Thomas?