Margaret Ashworth
Margaret writes Frontier Tech Wire's analysis desk, examining cash runways, valuation, and the distance between technical milestones and commercial revenue.
Articles by Margaret Ashworth
Pasqal's First Results as a Listed Company Came With a Resale Prospectus for 286.7 Million Shares Against 212.3 Million Outstanding. The Filing Assumes a $7.80 Conversion Price, and the Stock Was Last Reported Below It
First-half revenue was €4.9 million and the operating loss €59.2 million, with cash of about €312.9 million at Aug. 27. The resale prospectus dated Sept. 18 prices the $312.5 million convertible at its $7.80 floor, not the $12.00 headline, and the Sept. 24 supplement reports a last sale of $7.47.
Trio-Tech's Fiscal 2026 in Four Reports: Revenue Up 72%, Gross Margin Down From 25% to 17%, Operating Profit Gone, and a $24.2 Million Backlog of Which $9.1 Million Is Labelled 'Soft'
The Singapore-run semiconductor test house reported on Sept. 24 that fiscal 2026 revenue reached $62.6 million while the year ended with an operating loss of $204,000 and a net loss of $34,000. Lining up its four quarterly releases shows gross margin held between 16% and 19% all year against 23% to 27% a year earlier, and the 10-K says $9,054,000 of the year-end backlog is a three-month demand estimate rather than firm purchase orders.
Retail Was Locked Out of VC for Decades. One ASX Code Changed That.
Venture capital was invite-only. Scalare Partners (ASX: SCP) put it on the exchange: 27 early-stage tech companies, one share, 360% lodged revenue growth.
DARPA Reopened Its Quantum Entry Stage. The Stage A Ceiling Is $1 Million — and Two Deadlines Are in Play
DARPA reopened the entry stage of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative in March, with full proposals for the Stage A QBIT topic due Sept. 30, 2026 — while the parent opportunity listing carries a Dec. 30, 2026 date. The agency's own briefing decks put the money on offer at up to $1 million for six months, and describe the programme as validation, not research funding.
A quantum hardware vendor and an HPC analyst say the bottleneck is software. Read the small print on who is asking
Alice & Bob and Hyperion Research have released the second report in their series, covered on Sept. 9, arguing supercomputing centres must fix the software stack before fault-tolerant machines arrive. It is a real gap, identified by real lab directors — and it is also the gap that most favours the company paying for the research.
NEC Is Reported to Have Stopped Building Quantum Hardware. The Company Will Not Confirm It
Four trade outlets have relayed Japanese press reports that NEC ended in-house superconducting quantum hardware work. NEC declined to comment on whether it had exited, and its statement addresses applications and proof-of-concept work rather than hardware. Frontier Tech Wire has not seen the underlying Japanese reporting.
Photonic's Peer-Reviewed QLDPC Paper Reports 2x and 3.5x Qubit Savings, Not the Preprint's 10x — and Its Aug. 25 Release Publishes No Number at All
The Nature Communications version of Photonic's SHYPS paper, published May 20, reports smaller qubit reductions than the arXiv preprint that is still widely quoted, and drops the preprint's headline pseudo-threshold comparison entirely. Tuesday's release gives neither set of numbers, uses the word "demonstrated," and does not say that every result is a circuit-level simulation.
A Record Analog Quarter and a Falling Chip Tape: Reading the August 19 Semiconductor Split
Analog Devices posted fiscal third-quarter revenue of $4.022 billion, up 40 percent year over year, with adjusted operating margin of 50 percent. In the same session 24/7 Wall St. reported Intel and AMD down about 4 percent and Broadcom about 5 percent at midday, even as long-dated Treasury yields declined and the broad tape held up. Those share-price moves are that outlet's intraday marks, not confirmed closes.
Coherent beat and guided above consensus, and the stock still slipped after hours
The photonics maker closed out fiscal 2026 with $2.05 billion in June-quarter revenue and guided the September quarter above Street numbers. Shares rose 8.24% during Wednesday's session and then eased in extended trading, capping a week in which the whole AI-optics complex traded on expectations rather than results.
After the Reset: Retail Conviction Meets Wall Street Caution in Quantum and AI Small Caps
A brutal mid-summer drawdown, fresh bullish analyst initiations and stubbornly loyal retail traders have left the frontier-tech trade at a crossroads heading into the fall.