Rigetti splits its engineering organisation in two and names a new COO and CTO. The delivery build-out lands against $5.1 million of quarterly revenue and a GAAP loss more than half made up of a non-cash warrant charge.

by Arash Shirazi · August 21, 2026

Quantum Computing Correspondent, Frontier Tech Wire

Rigetti Computing has reorganised the top of its engineering and commercial structure around getting quantum computers out of the door rather than only building them. In a release carrying a dateline of August 19, 2026 at 19:00 Eastern, the Berkeley-based company said it had established a dedicated Systems Delivery organisation and created a chief operating officer role to run it. Rigetti trades on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker RGTI, as stated in the release itself.

David Rivas, who had been chief technology officer since February 2023, becomes chief operating officer. Andrew Bestwick, previously senior vice president of quantum systems, becomes chief technology officer. Both report to chief executive Subodh Kulkarni. In the announcement Kulkarni said: "Rigetti's growing deployment activity makes this the right time to establish a dedicated organization focused on delivering and supporting systems for customers. This structure gives our commercial and operational teams clear, end-to-end accountability for scaling system delivery, while giving our technology organization even greater focus on quantum processor innovation and performance."

A corresponding Form 8-K, accepted by the Securities and Exchange Commission on August 19, put the effective date of the changes at August 18, 2026, and set Rivas's annual base salary at $440,000 in the new role. The filing lists his remit as fabrication operations, systems delivery, software, applications, commercial functions, government programs, supply chain and facilities. No compensation terms were disclosed for Bestwick, and no director or officer departed; both moves were internal.

The company framed the change as a response to demand for on-premises machines spanning its product range, from nine-qubit Novera systems up to 108-qubit Cepheus-class systems. What the release did not contain is the part that would let an outside reader size that demand. On Frontier Tech Wire's own reading of the release, it names no customers, gives no deployment counts and discloses no dollar figures. The Quantum Insider covered the reorganisation on August 20.

That matters because the financial backdrop is unambiguous. Rigetti reported second-quarter 2026 results on August 6. Revenue was $5.14 million, against $1.8 million in the year-ago quarter — close to a tripling, but from a very small base. Gross profit was $2.188 million, a 42.6 per cent gross margin. Total operating expenses were $30.25 million, producing an operating loss of $28.062 million. Benzinga reported that the revenue figure came in just under a consensus estimate of $5.15 million and that the shares fell 4.6 per cent to $15.77 in after-hours trading that evening.

The headline loss needs unpacking. Rigetti's GAAP net loss for the quarter was $52.606 million, wider than the $39.654 million GAAP loss a year earlier. But the single largest line inside it was non-cash: a $29.6 million charge for the change in fair value of derivative warrant liabilities, up from $20.6 million in the prior-year quarter. Strip that one item out and the GAAP loss is roughly $23.0 million. On the company's own non-GAAP basis, which also excludes stock-based compensation, the loss was $16.0 million. GAAP diluted loss per share was $0.16; non-GAAP diluted loss per share was $0.05.

The two figures answer different questions. The warrant remeasurement moves with Rigetti's own share price and says nothing about how much cash the business consumed. The operating loss of $28.062 million is the closer proxy for the cost of running the company for three months, and the cash flow statement is closer still: the company reported $32.0 million used in operating activities across the first half of 2026 — a six-month figure, not a quarterly one.

Against that, the balance sheet is the strongest part of the story. At June 30, 2026 Rigetti held $27.763 million of cash and cash equivalents, $365.946 million of short-term available-for-sale investments and $147.586 million of long-term available-for-sale investments — $541.3 million in total, with no debt outstanding. That is an unusually large cushion for a company at this revenue scale, and it is the reason a delivery reorganisation is a plausible use of management attention rather than a distraction from a funding problem. Divided by the first-half operating cash use of $32.0 million, the balance implies several years of runway at an unchanged rate of spending — Frontier Tech Wire's own division of disclosed cash by disclosed burn, not company guidance, and a delivery build-out is designed to raise that rate rather than hold it.

The financing risk attached to that balance sheet is dilution rather than insolvency. Rigetti has funded itself by selling stock: shares outstanding rose from 331,282,895 at December 31, 2025 to 333,676,881 at June 30, 2026. The company has also disclosed a letter of intent, signed in May 2026, with the U.S. Department of Commerce for an award of up to $100 million in funding over three years, under which the department would receive an equity stake in Rigetti. That award is not committed funding: the company lists its and the department's ability to enter into definitive transaction agreements, and the timing of any such agreements, among its risk factors. Neither item is changed by this week's announcement, and the derivative warrant liability that produced the $29.6 million charge is itself a claim on future share count rather than on cash.

On the technical side, the release restated Rigetti's published target of 99.5 per cent median two-qubit gate fidelity on its Cepheus-1-108Q system, with gate speeds of 50 to 70 nanoseconds. It is worth being precise about the grammar there: that is a target the company has published, not a result it announced this week. The Cepheus-1-108Q system itself is described as deployed in 2026.

The tape did not reward the news. RGTI closed at $17.71 on Tuesday August 18, down 5.14 per cent; $17.00 on Wednesday August 19, down 4.01 per cent; and $16.07 on Thursday August 20, down 5.47 per cent, according to closing data compiled by StockAnalysis; the daily percentages here are our own calculation from those closes. From the Tuesday close to the Thursday close that is a decline of about 9.3 per cent. Thursday was a broadly weak session across the market: the S&P 500 finished at 7,641.16, down 0.87 per cent, the Dow Jones Industrial Average at 52,759.21, down 1.32 per cent, the Nasdaq Composite at 26,067.17, down 1.00 per cent, and the small-cap Russell 2000 at 2,992.43, down 1.34 per cent, on the Associated Press daily levels wire.

Friday's session has not closed and no closing price for August 21 exists yet. As an intraday marker only, StockAnalysis quoted RGTI at $17.38 at 11:34 a.m. Eastern on Friday August 21, up about 8.2 per cent against Thursday's $16.07 close by our own calculation. On the 333,676,881 shares Rigetti reported outstanding at June 30, that price implies a market capitalisation of about $5.80 billion. Frontier Tech Wire found no company announcement from Rigetti on Friday morning to account for the move, and does not attribute it to one. Dividing that $5.80 billion by $20.6 million — second-quarter revenue multiplied by four — gives roughly 280 times annualised revenue. That is Frontier Tech Wire's own crude arithmetic on two disclosed inputs, an intraday price and a single quarter's revenue; it assumes no growth from a business whose revenue nearly tripled year over year, and it is set down here as a scale marker, not as a view on what the shares are worth.

One small footnote from the same window. A Form 4 reported by Investing.com on August 20 showed Rivas selling 9,038 shares that day at prices between $16.63 and $16.965, a weighted average of $16.7885. Investing.com described the sales as nondiscretionary and executed to satisfy tax withholding obligations arising from the settlement of restricted stock units, rather than as discretionary trades. Rivas was left holding 316,907 shares.

The test of this reorganisation is not the org chart. It is whether the next set of quarterly results shows systems revenue that scales with the delivery headcount Rigetti is now formalising — and whether the company begins naming the customers taking the 108-qubit machines. Neither arrived with this week's announcement.