Newly public quantum company Xanadu posted a net loss of $20.6 million USD ($28.3 million CAD) in its inaugural earnings call, but revenue grew fourfold compared to the same period last year. “I want to take a moment to acknowledge what this call represents, not just a financial reporting milestone but a public commitment to transparency and accountability,” CEO Christian Weedbrook told analysts during the call.
The Toronto firm announced its first-quarter earnings today after markets closed. It recorded a $0.28 loss per share, larger than anticipated by analysts who had predicted an $0.08 loss. But Xanadu beat expectations on revenue, bringing in $2.8 million—four times what it made in Q1 2025—mainly due to Xanadu’s participation in a US military-backed quantum research program.
CFO Michael Trzupek said access to capital from both the US and Canadian governments is key to the company’s growth, as it will allow them to innovate faster and work toward the goal of building a quantum data centre in Toronto by 2029.
Along with fellow Canadian quantum firms Photonic and Nord Quantique, Xanadu is a participant in the US Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), a program run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). All three companies have made it to the second phase of the program, which awards companies $5 million USD and the opportunity to negotiate for another $10 million USD. The final phase offers $316 million USD if participants can develop a functional, fault-tolerant quantum computer.
Canada announced its equivalent of this program last fall—the Canadian Quantum Champions Program—which offers Xanadu and other selected companies up to $23 million CAD in its first phase.
The company reported an adjusted EBITDA loss of $13.9 million, compared to $10.6 million in the same quarter last year, and ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $272.5 million.
In an interview with BetaKit on Friday, Weedbrook said Xanadu is prioritizing technical milestones and partnerships rather than chasing short-term revenue.
“We’re going after the big prize, which really is this large-scale quantum computer we’re calling a quantum data centre,” Weedbrook said.
Xanadu shares on the TSX dropped Friday by more than 10 percent on the results. This was Xanadu’s first full quarter as a public company, after going public via a special-purpose acquisition deal (SPAC) on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and the Nasdaq on March 27. It debuted at roughly $10 CAD per share on the TSX in late March, when markets were weighed down by high oil prices related to the war in Iran.
The stock has been on a rollercoaster ride, triggering multiple trading halts after it spiked more than 300 percent in one week, but shot back down on May 4 due to nearly 300 million stock registrations and has hovered around the $20 mark since. Weedbrook addressed the stock rollercoaster during the earnings call, noting that he felt that some investors were “looking for patterns” and perhaps reading too much into a recent Nvidia announcement in which the chipmaker noted it was releasing a family of open-source quantum AI models.
“The substance behind it, to be fully honest, didn’t warrant in those stocks going up in the way they did,” he said, adding that Xanadu has already been using Nvidia chips for years, and that the GPUs don’t actually provide value to Xanadu’s quantum error correction because their photonics are simply “too fast.”
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John McPeake, a senior research analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, told BetaKit that the stock “seems to have a mind of its own.” The key technical metric for Xanadu, McPeake said, is reducing loss rates. This refers to light particles, or photons, being lost as they travel through the quantum circuits, contributing to errors. Last quarter, Xanadu claimed it had reduced optical loss by 60 percent in 2025, a 20-fold improvement over the past three years.
“We’re in a phase now of component improvements: how to reduce loss, how to get the chips as performant as possible,” Weedbrook said. Part of why Xanadu went public, he added, was to produce and test more quantum chips, which are designed in Toronto and fabricated in partnership with different foundries around the world. These will eventually form the basis of Xanadu’s large-scale quantum computer.
In the meantime, Weedbrook told BetaKit that he is “considering” making an enterprise play with Xanadu’s open-source quantum programming software, PennyLane, but that revenue would likely be “insignificant” compared to the proceeds from its eventual quantum computer. PennyLane has more than 150 university partners around the world, and 35,000 monthly users.
Xanadu also said it plans to establish a $300-million USD synthetic “at-the-market” facility. In an earnings call, Trzupek said this would give Xanadu flexibility to raise capital over time as opportunities come up, and that all proceeds will go straight to the balance sheet.
RELATED: Canada launches its own quantum research program to rival DARPA initiative
Founded in 2016, Xanadu is aiming to bring photonics-based quantum computing to market—technology that could perform exceptionally fast and complex computations at room temperature, quicker than traditional computers.
By merging with Philadelphia-based special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Crane Harbor Acquisition Corp., Xanadu became the first Canadian technology company to debut on the TSX since 2021. It’s also the first pure-play photonic quantum computing business to go public.
On the earnings call, Weedbrook said that its public offering has accelerated its path to commercializing quantum technology. Indeed, the SPAC deal allowed Xanadu to access financing that has been challenging to obtain through private markets. After announcing the SPAC deal, Xanadu raised $275 million from AMD, the asset management arms of BMO and CIBC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Georgian Partners, and OMERS Ventures, among others.
Partnerships will be key to achieving Xanadu’s goals, Weedbrook said. Its partnership with defence giant Lockheed Martin is a paid contract, he added, but its partnership with chip maker AMD is not. “Quantum will not succeed in isolation,” he told investors. “Our mission is to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere.”
When it went public, Xanadu said it earned approximately $302 million USD in gross proceeds from the SPAC transaction, much lower than the up-to-$500 million USD it initially estimated when the $3.6-billion USD deal was first announced in November (due to redemptions). That $500-million USD figure consisted of $225 million USD from Crane Harbor’s trust account (assuming no redemptions by the SPAC’s public stockholders) and the $275 million.
Xanadu is also in talks with the Canadian and Ontario governments for a combined investment of up to $390 million CAD, in part to establish semiconductor and photonic manufacturing capabilities.
UPDATE (05/15/2026): This story has been updated with additional analyst commentary and quotes from Xanadu’s CEO.