RGTI is a high-risk lottery ticket with weak fundamentals; I would not buy it over IonQ.

Let us know in the chat if you own either of these stocks. We always like to know if we are talking to uh current shareholders from a difficulty level. No position in either. We have We do have shareholders here.

What what a buyer weighs in the architecture is ion's traps ion approach competes against the superconducting circuits Google, IBM and Regetti built.

let's go ahead and do transition to RGTI, Regetti Computing. All right. This is a company that came public same time 2021. Uh had a huge runup. When was this? 2025. and then have come crashing down to earth.

It's a market loser since uh since coming public. It's in the semiconductor space. The market cap is a third founded two years earlier and one almost 1/8 the employee base of um of Ion Q.

Some quick stats. It's also making money selling its product. The losses are it's further behind from a um business uh growth cycle phase. 400 million in cash, 7 million in debt. Um revenue is negative.

That's interesting. Price to sales is 800. Price to book is 10. Now, let me just I'm going to interrupt you. This is a pre-revenue company. Ah, well, there you go. There you go.

Well, let's learn about this business. Regetti is a full stack quantum computing company. It designs its own superconducting quantum processors using a chiplet design that wires small chips into larger machine and then builds them into a fab one, which it calls the industry's first dedicated quantum device plant.

So, it seems like both of these fabricate their own chips or have plans to. Yeah. Which is interesting.

What it sells today is mostly complete quantum computers that research institutions install and run alongside paid research works and cloud access to its own machines. Same business model.

The money now comes mainly from selling those machines outright and each sale is booked when the system reaches the buyer. So revenue arrives in lumps, hence the negative revenue. uh research engagements and cloud subscriptions sold through Amazon, Microsoft, Cubid, and its own service make up the rest.

What's distinctive is that one company owns the chain from chip design through application to cloud delivery, funding years of building ahead of a market that barely exists. Let me read that again.

What's distinctive is that this one company owns the chain from chip design through fabrication to cloud delivery, funding years of building ahead of a market that barely exists.

I mean it's basically what it it would be like if Amazon or Google like bought Broadcom and Taiwan Semi.

collaborative research collaborative research and professional services is 94% of revenue or $7 million. Seven $7 million and the quantum computing access the better of the two businesses is 400 400,000.

Who are the customers? The buyer is an organizations that wants quantum computers years before it goes mainstream and most of them now buy a machine rather than own research equipment.

National science and defense programs carry the business from DARPA to UK's national quantum computing in India and they increasingly install and run these systems themselves. Large companies like standard charter HSBC and Moody's buy research work in cloud access which man Amazon sells.

They are funding capability and learning not solving a production problem. So the purchase is a bet on being ready when quantum computers turn useful.

Wade against IBM, Google, Microsoft, ion Q, D-Wave, and other builders. Regetti's draw is that we'll hand over a complete machine to install on site. So the buyer controls the hardware rather than renting a time.

I don't love that. I don't love that their business model is very much the hardware. kind of like they don't have a choice because their architecture matches what IBM already has.

So they need to differentiate somehow and IBM's smart enough to say well we don't want to sell the hardware.

Um from a geography perspective US is half Europe is other half Asia is 3%. But the numbers here are so tiny it's it's basically a revenue business quality.

How predictable is revenue? It's unpredictable. They're based on grant cycles grant cycles. Can it raise prices? Revenue comes from negotiated government research contracts, not list prices.

So margins are deeply negative with no expansion. How recession proof is it? It's going to be lumpy. And what's their competitive position? They're subscale against larger rivals where scale is the edge and no peer group to verify returns.

It positions grades conservative to weak. Agreed.

Is this an Yeah, I'll go with I'll go with four personally. Um it's an exciting business but there they seem to be at least for now focused more on the hardware which is not an exciting business versus the renting of the business which is more exciting.

All right. What phase of the business growth cycle is this in? This is another phase one company although the revenue is down um from from last year. So 10 years. So revenue was red means down green means up. Um, operating profit is down, by the way.

Um, um, yeah. So, match up this chart to to this picture here. This is a phase one company. Uh, [snorts] phase one company. No buying back stock, no paying a dividend. This one's an easy call. They're phase one

Very similar numbers here to um IronQ. Regetti has a thin moat. Its patent estate is a real but bounded source with no source and its strongest level and returns that still lack.

One real source, the chiplet patent estate, sits above its weakest level, lifting the moat to thin, nothing's at full strength, and the returns are not there to prove out it has a moat, that the moat is widening.

Uh, patent count keeps rising and the cubit count climbs towards a larger module system with no barrier eroding. More chips. It's cubit count scaled from 9 to 36 to 108 with a thousand plus cubit system now planned and yeah so it's edge is is getting wider even though if it's thin uh right now I'll give it the same grade we gave to ionq

growth it better be insanely high growth potential analysts expect revenue to grow 228% next year from to 23 million 13 analysts think so huge jump off a tiny base the backward industry is mixed and the ramp has already started.

Revenue hit 5 million in June against 1.8 million a year ago on the new Nova sales early evidence in the project ramp has began to operate.

Let me let me take a quick second to go back to the business phase here and go into the deep dive section here. What was that? Customer profile, revenue breakdown, geography, key operating metrics, cubit count, the flagship system stailed and is expected to reach the sephus one uh in May 2026 is expected to reach this 2 cubit gate fidelity.

Yeah, you got to learn a whole new language. I was wondering if the deep dive had the um the breakdown of it. Either way, I'm also very comfortable just saying what's the growth here? Five. I mean, it's it's five out of five.

Management team also poor, missing revenue estimates, heavy dilution, and a widening operating loss outweighs the 543 million in cash and no new equity invest. Regetti came in below analyst revenue estimates in six of the last eight quarters.

The weight that pulls the overall management down. I agree. stock simplifier the real capital offset management raised money the loss the losses are rounding just Chad Regetti founded but he left in 2022 founded the company and was a founder he has since departed no longer an officer or director

okay this guy owns 1% of the stock $41 million he's been president since 2022 after running this an MIT doctorate owns about two million shares do employees like working here. Similar results.

Do they beat expectations? Let's go to the execution tab. Miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss miss, beat, beat.

It it is tough because it's grants. Like that's what most of this is are grants, which is not what Wall Street analysts are adept at evaluating. So, you think that's more of a fact of the business model makes this unpredictable?

So, so does that mean that if you were to grade management here, you would grade them kinder? I would grade it as it's impossible to make a grade. That's what I would do.

Well, from a sake, from a percent of um consistency, personally, I'm like, did you make the numbers or not? And I care about revenue numbers. And the answer to me is no, no, no, no, no, no. Yes, yes. So, I call that a mixed track record.

Are they shareholder friendly? The dilution is huge. Are they? So, I'm gonna give this company a three management team. And that might be generous. I'm gonna go two. I'm gonna go two.

I I would go two as well. I I think this is a two management team. They don't have a ton of stock. The founder is gone. Their e their execution history um at least until very recently was was was poor.

So, two we don't have any other data to judge management.

It's like there's there's very little to base these opinions on. Yep. Risks. Um well, three of the four factors are at their worst. Concentration, disruption, and outside fortress.

Offsetting that is the balance sheet. This one's easy. How risky is it? Extremely risky.

Uh valuation. Well, price to sales. What are they what are they trading at? They're trading at 400 times sales. Look at this. They were down to 10 times sales. Was this like a Was this a company that was worth only a couple million dollars?

It could have been. Wow. Um, and again, when companies are in this stage, overvalued is more of a positive sign than it is a than it is a negative sign. I'm not going to do the TAM analysis here.

Um, other other than to say if you believe that this stock is going to be a home run, uh, what are the odds of that happening? So, I'll just call it moderately expensive.

Um, so same results here. So, just to put this in perspective, uh 3.3 was your score for uh Ion Q and a 2.9 and they both got the same uh valuation rating.

There you go. Yeah, there you go. Okay. Uh no capital return. We we saw the mixed earnings and everything everything I will say that their their runway isn't their their cash runway does not engender a ton of of good faith right now.

So they've got I think about $350 million $350 million in cash and short-term investments. At the same time over the last 12 months they've burned through about 90 million. So that's like four years worth of cash.

But if they if they ever start ramping up because their their whole thing is being fully vertically integrated. When you ramp that up, that's going to take cash I I I totally I totally agree.

It seems like they're trying to get the business set at Regetti right now, but the science has to be there, too.

So if you think about the the the the scale of the business growth cycle, Regetti is still really towards the left end of phase one. Ion Q is more towards proving out that the the execution um is real.

Both of these companies are are lottery. Both of these companies are lottery tickets. So you're betting on the architecture and the execution. So both are extremely high risk. But for me, if I was to pick one, no doubt Ion Q would be the one that I that I bet on.