Infleqtion CEO Matt Kinsella on how the newly public quantum computing company is “following in the footsteps of Nvidia”

Matt Kinsella is channeling his inner Kobe Bryant.

Fresh off a double-digit gain in Infleqtion’s first day of trading, the message from the CEO of the newest public quantum computing company is simple: job’s not finished.

“Today is in no way, shape, or form a finish line,” he told us. “Today is a refueling; today is a turbocharging of our batteries. Now our tank is full and the real mission begins, and that is to bring quantum from the research world into commercialization.”

Infleqtion, which began trading following the completion of its SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp X, makes quantum sensors used in clocks and antennas in addition to computers. Unlike publicly traded peers, the firm utilizes neutral atom technology.

Its official entry into the market, and the flood of investor funds into the shares, seemingly came at the expense of other pure-play companies like D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, and IonQ, all of which finished lower on the day.

Infleqtion is the first quantum company to come to market this year, but it probably won’t be the last. Xanadu Quantum Technologies and Quantinuum are both expected to be publicly traded by the end of this quarter and the first half of the year, respectively.

Kinsella, when asked how Infleqtion would stand out, told us:

“In terms of differentiation, I truly believe Infleqtion has a very differentiated strategy that public investors will appreciate and that is following in the footsteps of Nvidia. It’s taking this very powerful quantum core that we are the only people in the world who can make and applying it to these very interesting and market opportunities. Just like they took their GPU and first started focusing on gaming, then focused on crypto mining and the like, and then ultimately large language models, we’re pointing this at timekeeping and sensing and ultimately computing. And you call it an island-hopping mentality versus just waiting until quantum computing gets to the point where it’s doing commercially useful things and then monetizing.”

We chatted with the CEO on Tuesday to discuss the technological and financial milestones he’s working toward, the advice he got from fellow CEOs, what he’ll keep his eyes on instead of the stock price, and how he’s celebrating.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Sherwood News: Starting off with the presumption that congratulations are in order. You’re officially trading, you’ve had a pop, extremely high retention and low redemptions among class A shareholders, and you have capital to put to work. Is this mission accomplished?

Matt Kinsella: A very timely question, because I’ve been saying this to our employees on repeat going back for the last couple weeks, and we’ll continue to do this going forward — and that is today is in no way, shape, or form a finish line. Is it an end goal? Today is a refueling; today is a turbocharging of our batteries. Now our tank is full and the real mission begins, and that is to bring quantum from the research world into commercialization, which we have been doing in the form of our sensors over the last many years, but we’re getting closer and closer for computing. So not an end goal, and not a finish line. A refueling is the way I think about it. With a lot of fuel. 

Sherwood: Always nice to have. One thing that I’ve seen you mention is that on the technological front, Infleqtion’s been a little ahead of schedule in terms of developing and demonstrating logical qubits. So I was wondering if you could let me know both what enabled you to be ahead of schedule, and does this at all change the timetable for getting to 100 logical qubits? Which I believe you flagged as a very important level in terms of demonstrating the ability to have some commercially relevant applications.

Kinsella: You are right that we did hit our target, or we exceeded our 2025 target, which was originally to have eight logical qubits by the end of the year, and we had 12 by October. And our road map calls for 30 logical qubits by the end of this year, and then 100 by the end of 2028. Will this capital accelerate that?

Well, we’re going to do everything we can to execute against that road map, faster than the road map, but I still think that’s my best guess as to how things play out at this point in time. And just to be clear, we are going to increase some investments into R&D, but I’m not thinking of materially increasing our burn rate.

With some of this, you can throw extra money at the problem to make it move faster, but some of it’s just the process playing out, if that makes sense. 

Sherwood: That’s the technological side of things, but what about the financial milestones? Can you share anything more that’s happened or developments in terms of the pipeline of future sales, or what you’re kind of looking to get to there?

Kinsella: We did $29 million in revenue in 2024, and then we announced that we did $50 million of booked and awarded business in 2025. I think that sets a good foundation for significant revenue growth going forward, and revenue and gross profit dollars have been core to our mission from when I first seeded the business in 2018. So the generation of revenue, the generation of gross profit dollars to then invest back into the business in the form of R&D and to offset the burn that we’re incurring, as well, has always been part of our focus area. That’s a little different than some other, deeper tech companies that are focused just on the research side of it. 

I’ve always deeply believed that we need to develop that muscle of commercialization, and that’ll come in handy in a number of ways. Number one, it’s just a mentality thing. You know, switching a bunch of academics from a research mindset to a mindset of we need to ship product, we need to deliver that product on time, that product needs to work, it needs to have a manual. You can’t ship a team of physicists along with it, and you can’t keep turning screwdrivers to optimize it. That’s a very different mentality than the world of academia or even the world of a research-focused company. So we’ve been embedding this “we need to ship product and it needs to work, and we need to abide by customer timelines” DNA into our company from day 1. Alongside that comes building a real business with real revenue and gross profits. So I would anticipate we continue to focus on that going forward, and that’ll be core to our mission on top of getting the R&D to the point where our quantum computers can start to be commercially useful.

Sherwood: To shift tacks a little bit, you’ve got a scoreboard now with the stock market. It’s a scoreboard that’s going to change a zillion times, five days a week. So I know a lot of leaders will say, “Hey, I’m not going to focus on it. You’ve got to take care of other things and that’ll take care of itself.”

But for high-growth companies, the currency of your stock price matters. So how is the scoreboard going to influence how you think about the company and possibly your actions? 

Kinsella: Well, I was highly focused on the scoreboard in the form of the stock price leading up to the transaction, because it was very, you know, very important that the stock price was above a certain threshold to make sure that the redemptions were minimized.

That said — and I’m not just going to echo the answer that you’ve mentioned other CEOs give, I won’t ignore it — but I will do my best to not let near-term stock fluctuations weigh too heavily on myself, or probably more importantly, on the team. Having been a public market investor myself for many years, I used to say, if you were to give me all of the information, like I knew exactly what was going to be in an earnings release, I couldn’t tell you which way the stock was going to trade. There are a ton of factors and forces that play into the near-term performance of any given security. So I’m going to keep myself focused on the creation of long-term shareholder value, which I would view over years, and to me that’s the true North Star.

And that’s no different than when we were in the private markets. It’s funny, people will say, “Oh, you’re going to have all this volatility.” And that’s true, because as you point out, there’s a scoreboard. But could you imagine if you could actually see the daily ticker prices of early-stage private companies, and what those would be doing? They’d be moving around like 50%, 60% a day. You just don’t see it, because there’s no liquid market. 

So I will have to make sure we keep the team focused on the long term, which they wouldn’t be surprised to hear me say. It’s the creation of long-term shareholder value, whether you’re in the private world or the public world — to me it’s the same thing. Just keep your eye on the prize and, you know, the near-term fluctuations will come as they may. 

Sherwood: To that end, when you’re putting your blinders on, what is it in terms of the internal metrics that you are going to be focused on that will let you say, “It doesn’t matter if the company, the industry, the entire world’s out favor right now, but we are on the right path.” What’s that North Star?

Kinsella: Revenue growth and revenue dollars. Gross margins and gross profit dollars. Then you’re turning the company to free cash flow positive at some point in time. And then also, of course, the technological milestones, which for compute differ from sensing. On compute, it is to view the curve as up and to the right: more qubits, higher-quality qubits to get to that 100-logical qubit level and beyond. And then for our sensing product, it’s to drive down the cost and drive down the form factor of those products to make them easier and easier to proliferate out into the market en masse, I’d say off the top of my head. Those are things I’ll be focused on. 

Sherwood: Awesome. And you also alluded to having a history as a public equity and private investor, but I believe this is your first time running a publicly traded company, right? 

Kinsella: That is correct.

Sherwood: You’ve got a big rolodex and no shortage of folks to talk to on that front. Have you gotten any advice on what changes now or what to make sure you don’t change now from friends and peers who’ve been in your shoes? 

Kinsella: I have gotten some good advice from folks who have been CEOs of publicly traded companies, and a lot of it has to do with just that there are more eyes on you, which I think in many ways is a good thing. It’s right. It’s why companies come public — it’s because the broader public can invest in the company. So more people are going to be watching what we do, and I think that’s really healthy for us, and a great way for us to continue to evolve and mature as a business.

But it also means, for me personally, I just have to be aware that there’s just going to be more eyes on what I say, and what I do, and I just have to always be mindful of that. I think the biggest thing, though, is really just making sure all of our folks at Infleqtion realize that nothing has changed in terms of, we are pursuing the same mission as we were yesterday before we were publicly traded: it is the commercialization of quantum technologies, which is going to be the next technological revolution for humanity. So it’s an incredibly important mission that we’re on, and the fact that we can see that real-time scoreboard, it’s really mostly a distraction. Just don’t focus on it much and continue to focus on the mission. And over time, if we do our job, the stock price will take care of itself. 

Sherwood: And you’re the first quantum company that’s been able to transition to going public this year. But as we’ve seen before, this is something that tends to happen in bunches. There will be more coming. Something I think we’ve already seen today is that the addition of Infleqtion is kind of causing pressure on peer companies. Do you worry about oversaturation in this space, and how do you make sure that you stand out as not just a quantum computing company, but the quantum computing company in the eyes of investors?

Kinsella: I’m not worried about oversaturation. I did want to make sure we were ahead of this coming trend that you mentioned, which is why we took that first-mover stance on going down this path, at least in this most recent wave, largely because I just wanted to make sure we got the deal done, because that was the point of doing this. 

To me, it’s a capital-raising endeavor, right? Going public is a byproduct of the capital that we raised and the form of capital raising that we did. So I’m not concerned about saturation. And in terms of differentiation, I truly believe Infleqtion has a very differentiated strategy that public investors will appreciate, and that is following in the footsteps of Nvidia. It’s taking this very powerful quantum core that we are the only people in the world who can make and applying it to these very interesting and market opportunities. Just like they took their GPU and first started focusing on gaming, then focused on crypto mining and the like, and then ultimately large language models, we’re pointing this at timekeeping and sensing and ultimately computing. And you call it an island-hopping mentality versus just waiting until quantum computing gets to the point where it’s doing commercially useful things and then monetizing. So to me, it’s a very rational strategy. It’s a very different IT strategy, and one that I anticipate will be pretty well received by the public market. 

Sherwood: Island-hopping is also my honeymoon strategy. One thing I was also wondering is, is it a goal, or would it be a good thing, for Infleqtion to trade at an industry-level multiple? In my experience, companies that are presumed to be better run or have better growth potentially typically get rewarded with a higher multiple. In the past we’ve talked about Infleqtion having, I would argue, a lower likelihood of dilution thanks to the sensing business that turns a gross profit, and you’ve also mentioned that neutral atom is less capex intense than other modalities. On that alone, I would say, all else equal, if we don’t necessarily know who’s going to be the big winner in the development of quantum technology and commercialization, why wouldn’t I reward or pay a little extra for the one who’s pursuing it on a cheaper basis?

Kinsella: It seems logical to me the way I think about multiples, and back in my investor days, I would always evaluate companies on fundamentals, expectations, which, you know, is really just looking at where consensus estimates are relative to where myself as an analyst thought the business could earn. And then finally valuation. And to me, the valuation piece — and multiples are sort of the heuristic for valuation — was always the part that was a little less science and a little more art. But you’re right, industries start to develop heuristic multiples, and companies that are perceived to be better will trade at higher multiples. And companies that are perceived to require less dilution will trade at higher multiples, which is all totally rational. But at the end of the day, the company is the value of all its discounted future cash flows today. So the market’s just looking for all the signals that it can plug into its algorithm to determine what multiple for the business to trade at. I think we’re doing all the things that I think is the right thing to do for long-term value creation, but it’ll be up to the market to make that decision. 

Sherwood: One thing I’ve kind of noticed, let’s call it quasi-recently, is quite a number of bolt-on acquisitions among the pure-play quantum computing peers, both IonQ and D-Wave, to either improve their ability to secure government contracts or bolster gate-model development. Do you feel pressure to match that strategy given that this is what your peers are doing? 

Kinsella: I feel no pressure to match the strategy. If you look at what some of them are doing, some of the acquisitions are in the broader quantum sensing arena, and that’s really been our strategy from day 1: to monetize on sensing and then build for computing. And we already have the infrastructure in place to address the quantum sensing market, so I feel very covered there. 

Look, the way I think about acquisitions — and having been an investor, I have a lot of experiences of acquisitions not going well — is that they are tricky to integrate, so I’m going to go in with a healthy degree of skepticism to acquisitions. With that said, the kind that can work and work very well are technology tuck-ins that would directly accelerate our existing road map. I worry if it gets us too far off of our core mission, so I probably wouldn’t be pursuing acquisitions along those lines.

But I do think there will be great opportunities for potentially smaller companies that are pursuing something similar to Infleqtion that would directly accelerate our road map to join forces. Infleqtion could be a great home for those teams. That’s where I would look if we were to do acquisitions; you would expect to find them in that area. So think about the core products we have, and there may be some core enabling technologies at other companies that might have a good fit. And ultimately we’ll go through the make versus buy decision for any of the acquisitions that we would pursue. 

Sherwood: Reading between the lines, that sounds more like bolstering the existing sensor part of the business rather than accelerating the quantum computing, or am I reading that wrong? 

Kinsella: Honestly, I really don’t have a sense. If there were some fundamental technology acquisition we could make that would materially accelerate our road map on compute, I would absolutely look into that. And there are enabling technologies in the form of photonics that cut across all of our products. But just from the most broad perspective, if we were to do acquisitions, it would be in some sort of technology bolt-on that would be directly influencing the existing road map as opposed to entering us into brand-new markets. 

Sherwood: Fantastic. And then on a personal level, professionally, and I’m sure financially, this is a great day for you. How are you celebrating?

Kinsella: Yeah, it’s a great day. Tonight we’re going out to dinner with the Churchill team, which will be exciting. And then tomorrow [Wednesday] morning is actually when we’re ringing the opening bell.

So today we open the stock, and in many ways, today was the bigger day because the stock started trading. But in terms of the celebratory environment, tomorrow is actually the main event. I’ll make some remarks tomorrow morning before the bell-ringing, and that’ll be about 9 in the morning Eastern.

Then we’ll ring the bell at 9:30, which will be a really neat life experience to do. And then we are having dinner, with some of our closest investors and partners and customers, et cetera, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange tomorrow night, which will be really special. So that’s the celebration that we have planned. Then it’s back to pursuing the mission.

Sherwood: Doubling down here, as you’re ringing the opening bell tomorrow, it’s going to be one moment that encapsulates a long journey for you. And I’m sure it’s a very, very long list, but who are you going to be thinking about in terms of who helped make that happen? 

Kinsella: Ooh, you know, I made a very conscious decision in what I was saying in my opening remarks tomorrow to not individually thank any people, because so many people have been part of this journey in so many different ways that I would be terrified I would accidentally leave some people out. And there have just been so many important people, you know. So the only one I’ll mention is just my wife, who put up with a lot for me to take this new role. We were living in San Francisco. She’s a San Francisco native. I was at Maverick for 18 years. We had no plans to leave San Francisco, and then I threw a curveball saying we need to move to Boulder to pursue this new opportunity. And she supported me and rolled with the punches. I forgot to mention we had a 1-month-old and a 3-year-old at the time. So I would highlight her as one person I would really thank. But there’s just been, you know, so many people, whether it was the people at the company, partners, advisers, customers, who have helped us get here. So I’m wary of listing any specifics.

Sherwood: I completely hear you, and I don’t think anyone besides Kieran Culkin has gotten in trouble by mentioning their wife in a thank-you acceptance speech, so I think you’re pretty safe there. Thanks for the time and congratulations again.