Quantum computing startup Rigetti announces it raised $24M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in March 2016 and $40M Series B led by Vy Capital in Nov. 2016
Cromwell Schubarth / Silicon Valley Business Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
These two 2016 rounds — $24M from Andreessen Horowitz in March, $40M from Vy Capital in November — were the early capital behind Rigetti's bid to make a practical quantum computer usable remotely, which surfaced publicly in its hybrid quantum-classical Quantum Cloud Services two years later.
The subsequent arc shows what that money bought and where it fell short: a $71M raise priced at a significant valuation cut in 2020 because commercial applications remained few, a SPAC listing expected to raise $458M at a $1.5B valuation in 2021, and a 28% staff cut alongside new CTO and CFO hires in 2023 as the company pushed to finish its 84-qubit Ankaa machine.
First-order effects
- Andreessen Horowitz and Vy Capital secure early positions in one of the few US quantum-hardware startups, with $64M committed across two rounds inside eight months of 2016.
- Rigetti gains the runway to fund both qubit development and the cloud-access layer it later ships as Quantum Cloud Services.
Second-order effects
- Follow-on capital keeps arriving at headline sizes — $50M in late 2017 — but round pricing begins tracking hardware milestones rather than revenue, culminating in the 2020 down round.
- The 2021 SPAC moves Rigetti's valuation discovery into public markets, exposing the gap between the $1.5B mark and commercial traction that later forced the 2023 restructuring.
Third-order effects
- The sequence — large private rounds, a down round, a SPAC pop, then deep layoffs — becomes the working template for deep-tech hardware companies raising against physics promises before product-ready economics exist.
- That Sygaldry could still raise $139M across seed and Series A in 2026 for quantum-classical AI servers suggests investor appetite persists, reframed around data-center integration rather than standalone quantum machines.
The trend: Quantum computing funding runs on milestone-driven boom-bust cycles, where each hardware claim resets valuations more than commercial revenue ever does.