NEW YORK, May 17, 2026, 18:22 EDT
- Rigetti finished Friday at $17.85, falling 7.37% for the session and roughly 5.8% below last Friday’s close.
- The Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.5% Friday, taking its loss for the week to 0.1%. High-beta tech stocks stayed under pressure.
- It’s a slow weekend ahead for investors, with Rigetti’s CEO set to speak at Canaccord Genuity’s virtual quantum symposium on May 21.
Rigetti Computing shares ended the week with losses. The quantum computing company dropped 7.37% to close at $17.85 on Friday, pulling back after its earlier earnings rally. U.S. markets were shut on Sunday. Investors are watching last week’s results ahead of an investor event set for Thursday.
Speculative tech stocks took a hit going into the weekend. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.5% on Friday and finished the week down 0.1%. The Russell 2000, heavy with small-caps, was off 2.4% for the week. That left the market with little appetite for unprofitable firms still working to show their tech can scale.
Rigetti (RGTI) jumped 8.29% on Monday, but shares dropped the next day and again on Friday. The stock is down about 5.8% from its May 8 close at $18.94. Trading stayed busy across earnings, with 49.5 million shares moving on Tuesday and 26.9 million on Friday.
Rigetti said first-quarter revenue hit $4.4 million, compared to $1.5 million a year ago. Operating loss for the quarter was $26.0 million. It reported $569.0 million in cash, cash equivalents and available-for-sale investments as of March 31.
Rigetti CEO Subodh Kulkarni said the company “continued to execute on our strategy” as it rolled out the 108-qubit Cepheus-1-108Q to Rigetti QCS, Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure Quantum and qBraid. The company is working to connect more qubits—which are the units of quantum information—while keeping error rates down. Rigetti & Co, LLC
Kulkarni said there is “growing adoption” from government, academic and commercial users. The company shipped a 9-qubit Novera quantum processing unit, or QPU, to the University of Saskatchewan in the quarter. The QPU is a chip package used for quantum calculations.
Analysts didn’t turn negative but did trim some targets. Mizuho dropped its price target to $27 from $33, still rating the stock outperform. Needham held its buy rating and kept the price target at $31 after the numbers.
Quantum stocks lost ground Friday as sellers moved out of the group. IonQ was down 9.6% in the session, D-Wave Quantum dropped 8.1%, and shares of Quantum Computing Inc. slid 10.4%, latest available market data showed. The selling extended beyond Rigetti, with investors pulling back risk from the sector.
Market sentiment worsened. Kenny Polcari, chief market strategist at Slatestone Wealth, told Reuters the market had “gotten way ahead of itself.” Treasury yields and oil prices put more pressure on higher-risk stocks. Reuters
Kulkarni is set to speak at the Canaccord Genuity Virtual Quantum Symposium on May 21 at 12:00 p.m. ET, an appearance that traders will be tracking for more details. Rigetti announced it on May 14, its latest post on the company news-release page.
Still, execution is the big risk. Rigetti has said it’s dealing with technical and engineering challenges as it tries to build quantum computers at scale and hit “quantum advantage,” which is when a quantum system can solve something a regular computer can’t handle. The company said no quantum computers have achieved this yet, including Rigetti’s own. SEC
The stock faces two main tests now—first, showing that customer orders turn into reliable revenue, and second, delivering better gate fidelity when promised. So far, shares are moving more on faith in the roadmap than on earnings.
