Shareholders of Supernova Partners Acquisition Company II have approved the firm’s acquisition of Rigetti Holdings, which was announced last fall. That means a new quantum computing stock will be made available for public trading on Nasdaq as early as Wednesday.
It also means that one of the emerging stars of the quantum computing hardware space so far has filled its pockets with just over $261 million in proceeds, including just over $147 million from private investment in public equity investors, prior to its public debut. Rigetti previously said it expected to see total proceeds of $458 million through this process.
The acquisition is expected to formally close on Wednesday, making the new combined company, to be called Rigetti, the second quantum computing company to go public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) transaction in the last year. The first was IonQ last year, and a third SPAC deal in the quantum space involving D-Wave Systems and DPCM Capital was announced last month.
Rigetti will trade under the ticker symbols "RGTI" and "RGTIW." The company previously outlined plans to achieve close to $600 million in revenue by 2026.
In recent weeks, Rigetti named Peter Pace to become chairman of the board of the combined company upon the closing of the SPAC transaction. Michael Harburn also recently was named CTO of Rigetti. Company founder Chad Rigetti continues as CEO.
While some companies in the quantum computing sector are focused on one aspect–hardware, software, quantum processors or applications–Rigetti is a full-stack quantum computing company whose most recent claim to fame is a multi-chip 80-qubit quantum processor assembled from two 40-qubit processors.
Rigetti processors leverage superconducting qubits, the same model as companies like IBM and Google. Other approaches to building qubits include trapped-ion, which is used by IonQ and Quantinuum, and neutral atom technology, which is favored by Atom Computing and Pasqal, among others.
One of the many big questions revolving around the quantum computing sector is which one of these technology approaches will dominate? For the foreseeable future, until more quantum computing users emerge and start picking one technology over another, each of these technologies is likely to find some corner of the market to stake a claim to.
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