Rigetti & Co, Inc. announced a subscription agreement to issue 10,251,000 common shares at $10 per share for total gross proceeds of $102,510,000 on October 6, 2021. The financing will include participation from funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Group, Inc.; In-Q-Tel, Inc.; returning investors Deer Management Company, LLC and Franklin Resources, Inc.; and new strategic partners Keysight Technologies, Inc., Palantir Technologies Inc., and Ampere Computing LLC. The company said the transaction is subject to consummation concurrently with the closing of the merger. Rigetti reported it has raised approximately $200,000,000 in funding to date. The company will issue the common shares under the Securities Act of 1933 relying on the exemption from registration provided by Section 4(a)(2) of the Securities Act and Regulation D. Rigetti focuses on building scalable, error-corrected quantum computers and offering high-performance access to current systems via a cloud-based service and AWS Braket (in preview). The company promotes a hybrid computing access model designed for practical applications and real-world use cases. Rigetti says the funding will move it closer to delivering quantum advantage to the market. It recently won an $8.6 million DARPA award to build a quantum computer aimed at outperforming classical machines. The company positions itself as a challenger to incumbents such as IBM, Microsoft and D-Wave. Leadership and investors cite potential impacts across biology, chemistry, logistics and materials science as motivation for the technology. Rigetti Computing develops a cloud quantum computing platform aimed at applications in artificial intelligence and computational chemistry and has opened private beta testing of its Forest API. Led by founder and CEO Chad Rigetti, the company is based in Fremont and Berkeley, California. It raised $64M across Series A and Series B rounds and has $69.2M raised to date. The funds will be used to expand business and engineering teams and to invest in infrastructure to manufacture and deploy its quantum integrated circuits. Rigetti recently moved to scale its team and production capabilities while continuing development of its cloud offering. Rigetti Computing builds quantum computing hardware and an ecosystem aimed at commercial deployments, using an iterative, simulation‑driven prototyping process to deliver predictable performance improvements. The company uses Ansys simulation software to test design changes rapidly without rebuilding circuitry each iteration. Rigetti plans to convert its small Berkeley offices into a nimble quantum lab and is hiring top Ph.D. graduates to staff development. Many of the engineering challenges it targets are non‑quantum aspects of the hardware, which the team believes can deliver reliable, scalable, and cost‑effective processors. The startup highlights potential applications including molecular simulation for drug and materials discovery, advanced AI, and cryptography. Rigetti is led by founder and CEO Chad Rigetti and is part of the current Y Combinator batch.

Total raised

$248M

Funding rounds

5

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Oct 2021