D-Wave Quantum Inc

NYSE:QBTS

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q2

[Operator]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the D-Wave Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Thursday, August 8, 2024. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kevin Hunt from Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[Unknown Executive]

Thank you, and good morning. With me today are Dr. Alan Baratz, our Chief Executive Officer; and John Markovich, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements and should be considered in conjunction with cautionary statements contained in our earnings release and the company's most recent periodic SEC report.



During today's call, management will provide certain information that will constitute non-GAAP financial and operational measures under SEC rules, such as non-GAAP gross profit, non-GAAP gross margin, non-GAAP adjusted operating expenses, adjusted EBITDA loss and bookings. Reconciliations to GAAP financial measures and certain additional information are also included in today's earnings release, which is available in the Investor Relations section of our company's website at www.dwavequantum.com. I will now hand over the call to Alan.

[Alan Baratz, executive]

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm excited to share our Q2 business results with you as we continue to see positive momentum across the business. The world is waking up to the fact that annealing quantum computing is here now, and it's driving measurable outcomes for our commercial, government and research customers. We believe that D-Wave is single-handedly, and I've said this before, single handedly creating the market for commercial quantum computing. Let me illustrate our momentum with a quote from IDC analyst Heather West, who recently wrote and I quote, "Because the D-Wave Quantum's quantum and dealer is specifically built for solving optimization problems, some may argue that the quantum and dealer is limited in the type of problem that it can be used to solve.



However, optimization problems are one of the most prevalent problems found in all industries. Hence, D-Wave quantum's technology provides an access point for all end users that are interested in using quantum computing to gain business value both today and into the future. Again, that's from IDC analyst, Heather West. So there is rapidly growing recognition of the value and potential of D-Wave and its unique annealing quantum computing solutions to: one, streamline and optimize business processes, including applications like workforce scheduling, vehicle routing and resource allocation; and two, fuel important research breakthroughs in areas like material science.



And there's a growing realization that annealing quantum computing can deliver results in these areas today, not 5 or 7 years from now, but today. For example, we're being invited to engage in an increasing number of government meetings and conferences to provide government personnel with a better understanding of the capabilities of quantum computing technologies today and in the future. We're also seeing an increase in third-party scientific papers highlighting our annealing quantum computing technology and its capabilities. Lastly, we're hearing from more and more customers from both the private and public sectors that they've tried quantum computing solutions, but need to work with D-Wave, the quantum vendor that has real, scalable and production-grade commercial solutions today.



Customers have indicated that abysmal availability and reliability from other quantum vendors are huge pain points and a block for accelerated adoption. We believe that only D-Wave is able to provide the commercial-grade systems and services to solve real-world, large-scale problems at the steep needed right now. I'd like to now walk through a few key business highlights, starting with product and technical advancements. Last week, we announced the Quantum AI, product development road map that extends D-Wave's lead quantum cloud service to incorporate AI and machine learning.



Our efforts will focus on helping customers address AI, ML workloads, including pretraining optimization, more accurate and efficient model training and opening new AI business use cases that require the integration of AI and business optimization. This effort is in direct response to growing demand from our customers as the broader industry is confronting a computing crunch. The amount of compute and the associated energy costs needed to satisfy a growing set of AI and ML use cases is rapidly escalating. Our PlanmAi solutions aim to leverage annealing quantum computing's ability to solve optimization problems to help customers achieve better, faster, cheaper and more energy-efficient AI and ML solutions. The opportunity for D-Wave could be massive, and more importantly, the benefit to our customers could be transformative.



As part of the Quantum AI product road map initiative, we recently announced a significant expansion to our commercial partnership with Zapata AI. Our extended collaboration is designed to accelerate the development and delivery of integrated quantum and generative AI solutions in D-Wave's LEAP cloud platform. The expanded agreement leverages the Pods universal generative AI software for rapid development and builds on D-Wave's Leap real-time quantum cloud service to support quantum, hybrid quantum, and even pure classical AI solutions. Together, our joint development work will focus on improved and more energy-efficient model training, more performant models and the synergistic use of generative AI and quantum optimization. It is an important piece of our overall Quantum AI strategy.



On the system side of our business, we shared that we are placing a second advantage quantum computer in the U.S. This will mark the fourth production quantum computer in the LEAP Quantum Cloud Service. We're thrilled that the system will reside at Davidson Technologies' new global headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama. I was actually just down in Alabama with Dale Moore and his team from Davidson at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium event, talking about the significance of this system placement, especially to the U.S. government. The system will eventually be housed in a secure facility that could run sensitive applications using our quantum technology.



This is an important development in our partnership with Davidson as we collaborate to accelerate quantum computing adoption among government agencies, especially in the areas of national security. We're also making noteworthy progress on our path toward delivering the 7,000-plus Cuban advantage 2 product. We are nearing completion of calibrating a 4,800-plus Qubit Advantage2 processor following the launch of the 1200-plus Qubit Advantage2 prototype earlier this year, which is available for customer use now in our LEAP Quantum Cloud Service. We are also furthering our ongoing development of new control protocols that should help customers perform expanded and richer quantum computations on our QPUs.



I'll highlight a few examples. The first is Fastenal. As discussed during our Q1 earnings call, we introduced our powerful new Fastenal feature in April. Tell if use as perform quantum computations at unprecedented speeds, thereby reducing the impact of external disturbances such as thermal fluctuations that can hinder quantum calculations. Customer response has been incredible as they have now submitted 2.5 million problems using this feature. The second is cyclic annealing. Research and development of cyclic and iterative annealing protocols are underway.



We could extend the coherent regime across multiple cycles. This means that the system could potentially provide the same performance benefits that would result from much longer coherent sins. Truly exciting work is happening here. The final is Bell inequality violation. By leveraging novel QPU control protocols, we have been able to show a violation of Bell's inequality, which is a widely recognized signature of quantum behavior in the fabric of our annealing in QPUs. We are able to produce targeted Qubit expectations and analyze and read out Qubit state in arbitrary bases midway through the annealing process.



This enables us to explore both digital and analog quantum computing protocols in the same processing fabric and potentially opens up important new applications opportunities such as metric or quantum distributions for generative AI architectures. Now turning to software. We launched a new nonlinear program hybrid quantum solver in June. This new solver enables customers to tackle real-world problems of growing complexity, supporting up to 2 million variables and constraints, which represents a tenfold increase in problem size capacity over other D-Wave solvers for certain applications. We also introduced new demos of applications built with this new hybrid solver addressing vehicle routing and flow shock scheduling.



These were introduced at our annual Qubit User Conference in June. The new hybrid solver is part of our expanding set of commercial quantum optimization offerings, supporting the aggressive go-to-market growth strategy that we announced earlier this year. During the quarter, we also continued to expand our extensive patent portfolio, totaling over 240 issued U.S. patents with more than 60% of our patents covering both annealing and gate model technologies. D-Wave patent portfolio is ranked as the third largest quantum-computing patent portfolio in the world behind only IBM and Google. So as you can see, we've been remarkably busy with technology and product development, delivering new solutions that are 100% focused on providing customer value.



It's not innovation for innovation's sake, but rather a development that helps our customers solve problems of even greater complexity in ways that are better, faster, less costly and more energy efficient. And speaking of customers, let's switch gears and discuss commercial momentum. Our second quarter 2024 bookings marked our ninth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in quarterly bookings. In comparing the most recent 4 quarters with the immediately preceding 4 quarters, our customer count rose from 114 to 130. -- commercial customers went up from 70 to 77, and we counted 26 Forbes Global 2000 companies as customers, constituting 33% of total commercial customers and 26% of total revenue. We are working with customers on a wide range of quantum optimization applications, including body shop scheduling and vehicle wrap. Let me highlight a couple of examples.



First, we are working with Ford Otosan, an automotive manufacturing company based in Turkey that is equally owned by Ford Motor Company and Catch Holding. Together, we have built a solution to generate a sequencing schedule that maximizes vehicle production for the body shop. The Quantum Optimization application was able to schedule 1,000 vehicles per room in under 5 minutes compared to 30 minutes using their current process. Next up, Hermes Germany, a leading logistics service provider in Germany is working with us and our partner, Quantum Basel, to explore a vehicle routing Quantum Optimization application to route trucks from 50 depots to a network of 17,000 parcel shops throughout Germany.



The project aims to understand quantum's ability to better optimize these routes in terms of time, distance and CO2 emissions. And as you can see, this falls right in the sweet spot of the verticalization strategy we've talked about previously with our focus on manufacturing and supply chain logistics. All are very exciting projects spanning a diverse set of Quantum Optimization problems. Just as exciting was the quantum industry's interest and participation in our 10th Cubic user conference in June. More than 600 attendees representing 452 organizations from 50 countries participated live or virtually, an incredible turnout for the ecosystem of D-Wave and annealing quantum computing supporters.



This year's theme was fittingly success powered by quantum, and we are excited to see an impressive group of organizations on stage sharing their stories of impact using D-Wave technology. This included Los Alamos National Lab, Mastercard, SaaS, Davidson Technologies, Quantum Basel, Depatie, Unisys and more. The energy was palpable with attendees inspired by these real-world successes and expressing their excitement for what we are building in our D-Wave quantum computing, quantum community. I think everyone was equally inspired by my dramatic reading of a reimagined version of the Tortoise and the Hare as I done smoking jacket and shared the story of D-Wave serving as the measured unflappable turtle winning the quantum race. If you haven't seen it, check out my Qubit's keynote on YouTube.



So we are clearly witnessing growing awareness and interest in our solutions in the commercial sector. But that's not all. We're also seeing similar traction in the government sector. This quarter, we saw an uptick in D-Wave interest from a number of major government organizations and companies that service the public sector to build applications that showcase quantum computing can address critical public sector and national security challenges.



Policymakers continue to expand government programs to encompass near-term applications as well as support for quantum annealing and quantum-classical technologies. Additionally, Congress is beginning to move policy, which supports establishing tested programs, exploring the intersection of AI with other emerging technologies like quantum computing. Let me highlight another sign of increasing interest in our technology. We've seen double-digit enrollment growth for our quantum training forces in the first 6 months of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.



Enrollment in the quantum programming core course increased by 53% and combined enrollments for our core plus foundations for quantum programming increased by 85%. We believe this underscores a growing global movement to train workers to keep pace with the rapidly increasing adoption of quantum computing and specifically D-Wave technology. John will walk you through the financials in just a minute, but there are 2 financial-related items that I wanted to call out. First, D-Wave has joined the Russell 3000 Index. As you all know, Russell indexes are used by investment managers and institutional investors for index funds and as benchmarks for active investment strategies.



Our inclusion in this group is an honor, and will greatly increase visibility among the global investor community for the innovative quantum solutions we are bringing to market. And second, we are pleased to share that we ended the quarter with more than $50 million in cash, one of the company's highest quarter-end cash balances in history. It's been a solid quarter with impressive product innovations and customer adoption of these new products. Customers are clamoring to put these solutions to use in their operations. That appetite is evident in our commercial traction, government public sector interest and market position. With that, I'll hand the call over to John to provide a review of our second quarter and first half 2024 results. John?

[John Markovich, executive]

Thank you, Alan, and thank you to everyone taking the time to participate in today's call. In my review of the second quarter and first half results, I will be providing non-GAAP operating metrics, including bookings as well as non-GAAP financial metrics, including non-GAAP gross profits, non-GAAP gross margins, non-GAAP adjusted operating expenses and adjusted EBITDA losses. We believe these metrics improve investors' ability to evaluate our underlying operating performance.



These measures are defined in the tables at the bottom of today's second-quarter earnings press release with the non-GAAP financial metrics, for the most part, adjusting for noncash and nonrecurring expenses. Revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2024 totaled $2.2 million, an increase of approximately $500,000 or 28% from the second quarter of fiscal 2023 revenue of $1.7 million. Bookings for the second quarter totaled $2.7 million an increase of approximately $200,000 or 6% from the second quarter of 2023 bookings of $2.5 million. The $2.7 million in second-quarter bookings represents D-Wave's ninth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in quarterly bookings.



There are 2 noteworthy developments that I would like to highlight with respect to our bookings and bookings trend. One, our sales organization is currently undergoing a transformation under the new leadership of Lorenzo Martinelli, who joined D-Wave as Chief Revenue Officer several months ago. Lorenzo was focused on expanding the size of the sales organization as well as aligning the sales organizations, capabilities and expertise with our vertical market focus that encompasses manufacturing, supply chain logistics and government with a specific focus on 4 quantum market categories: optimization, AI, research and infrastructure. The entire go-to-market organization has been intimately involved with the organizational up leveling, which has had some impact on near-term sales productivity.



We are planning on completing this transformation by the end of this year. Second, the composition of our bookings in the first half of the year has trended towards larger, longer-term, higher-margin QCAS contracts that has changed the recent historical bookings to revenue relationship, providing an incrementally greater line of sight to our future year revenues and gross margins. Between the end of the fourth quarter of 2023 and the end of the second quarter, our revenue backlog increased by $3.1 million or 64% from $5 million to $8.1 million with the composition of the backlog shifting as follows: -- as of the end of December, 73% of the revenue backlog was expected to be recognized in the following 12 months and 27% thereafter, whereas as of June 30, 42% of the revenue backlog was expected to be recognized in the following 12 months and 58% thereafter.



Furthermore, QCAS as a percentage of the revenue backlog increased between the 2 periods. Our revenue backlog disclosure can be found in the remaining performance obligations footnote number three, for the financial statements set forth in our second quarter Form 10-Q that will be filed with the SEC after market close today. With respect to customers, we continue to broaden and diversify our customer base across commercial, government and research customers. In comparing the most recent 4 quarters with the immediately preceding 4 quarters, D-Wave had a total of 130 customers compared with a total of 114, 77 commercial customers compared with 70 commercial customers with the commercial customers, including 26 Global 2000 customers compared with 224 of the Global 2000 customers.



With these Forbes Global 2000 customers, constituting 33% of the total number of commercial customers over the last 4 quarters. With respect to commercial traction in comparing the most recent 4 quarters with the immediately preceding 4 quarters, revenue from commercial customers increased by 35% or $1.8 million. Commercial revenue as a percentage of total revenue remained relatively flat at 65.9% versus 66.7%. And revenue from Forbes Global 2000 customers increased by 50% or approximately $900,000 with Forbes Global 2000 customers, constituting 26% of total consolidated revenue. Several of these Forbes Global 2000 customers include NEC, VINCI, Cash Holdings, MasterCard, Bridgestone Corporation and the Interpublic Group.



With respect to gross profit. GAAP gross profit for the second quarter was $1.4 million, an increase of approximately $700,000 or 97% from the second quarter of fiscal 2023 GAAP gross profit of approximately $700,000, with the increase due primarily the growth in revenue and increased operating efficiencies. Non-GAAP gross profit for the second quarter was $1.6 million, an increase of approximately $600,000 or 61% in the second quarter of fiscal 2023 non-GAAP gross profit of approximately $1 million, again, with the increase due primarily to the growth in revenue and increased operating efficiencies.



The difference between GAAP and non-GAAP gross profit and gross margin is limited to noncash stock-based compensation and depreciation expenses that are excluded from the non-GAAP gross profit and gross margin. GAAP gross margin for the second quarter was 63.6%, an improvement of 22.3% from the second quarter of fiscal 2023 GAAP gross margin of 41.3%. We -- non-GAAP gross margin for the second quarter was 73.1%, an improvement of 15% from the second quarter of fiscal 2023 non-GAAP gross margin of 58.1%. With respect to operating expenses, the GAAP operating expenses for the second quarter were $20.2 million, a decrease of $1.4 million or 6% in the second quarter of fiscal 2023 GAAP operating expenses of $21.6 million, with the improvement driven primarily by decreases of $1.7 million in third-party professional services and approximately $400,000 in noncash stock-based compensation expense, partially offset by an increase of approximately $800,000 in marketing expenses.



Non-GAAP adjusted operating expenses for the second quarter were $15.5 million, a decrease of approximately $400,000 or 3% from the second quarter of fiscal 2023, non-GAAP adjusted operating expenses of $15.9 million that reflects the company's continued focus on expense management, with the decline driven primarily by a decrease of approximately $800,000 in third-party professional services, $200,000 in fabrication related activities and $200,000 in insurance, partially offset by an increase of approximately $800,000 in marketing expenses. Again, the difference between GAAP operating expenses and non-GAAP adjusted operating expenses is primarily non-cash stock-based compensation expenses and depreciation and nonrecurring expenses.



The net loss for the second quarter was $17.8 million or $0.10 a share, a decrease of $8.4 million or $0.11 per share from the second quarter of fiscal 2023 net loss of $26.2 million or $0.21 per share. Adjusted EBITDA loss for the second quarter was $13.9 million, an improvement of $1 million or 7% from the second quarter of fiscal 2023, adjusted EBITDA loss of $14.9 million, with the improvement driven by higher gross profit in combination with lower operating expenses. Now I will address the operating performance for the first half of 2024. D-Wave's revenue for the 6 months ended June 30, 2024, was $4.6 million, an increase of $1.3 million or 41% from revenue of $3.3 million in the 6 months ended June 30, 2023.



Bookings for the first half of fiscal 2024 were $7.2 million, an increase of $2.7 million or 58% from bookings of $4.5 million in the first half of fiscal 2023. GAAP gross profit for the first 6 months of fiscal 2024 was $3 million, an increase of $1.9 million or 171% from GAAP gross profit of $1.1 million for the first 6 months of fiscal 2023, with the increase due primarily to the growth in revenue and increased operating efficiencies. The non-GAAP gross profit for the first 6 months of fiscal 2024 was $3.5 million, an increase of $1.7 million or 89% from the year-earlier 6 months non-GAAP gross profit of $1.8 million. With respect to margins, GAAP gross margin for the first half of fiscal '24 was 65.6%, an increase of 31.4% from the 34.2% GAAP gross margin in the first half of fiscal 2023, with the increase due primarily to the growth in revenue and increased operating efficiencies.



The non-GAAP gross margin for the first half of fiscal 2024 was 75%, an increase of 18.9% from 56.1% in the 6 months ended June 30, 2023. The difference between GAAP and non-GAAP gross profit and margin is limited to the noncash stock-based compensation and depreciation expense that are excluded from the non-GAAP gross profit and gross margin. With respect to first-half operating expenses, the GAAP operating expenses totaled $39.4 million, a decrease of $7.3 million or 16% from the GAAP operating expenses of $46.7 million in the first half of fiscal 2023, with the year-over-year decrease primarily driven by $3.5 million in noncash stock-based compensation expense and $4 million in third-party professional services.



Non-GAAP adjusted operating expenses for the first half of 2024 were $30.3 million, a decrease of $3.4 million or 10% from $33.7 million in non-GAAP adjusted operating expenses in the first half of fiscal 2023. Net loss for the 6 months ended June 30, 2024, was $35.1 million or $0.21 per share compared with a net loss of $50.6 million or $0.40 per share in the 6 months ended June 30, 2023. Adjusted EBITDA loss for the first half of fiscal 2024 was $26.8 million, an improvement of $5 million or 16% from the adjusted EBITDA loss of $31.8 million in the first half of fiscal 2023, with the decrease due primarily to higher gross profit and reduced operating expenses, particularly with respect to third-party professional services.



Now we will address balance sheet and liquidity. As of June 30, 2024, D-Wave's consolidated cash balance totaled $40.9 million, an increase of $33.4 million or 444% from the year-earlier second quarter cash balance of $7.5 million. On April 12 of this year, D-Wave's $175 million S3 shelf registration statement was deemed affected by the SEC. On that same date, the company's equity line of credit S3 registration statement with Lincoln Park Capital Fund, also went effective. As of the effective date, the company had $82.1 million in available stock issuance capacity under the equity line of credit with the investment commitment running through October of 2025. We -- as of June 30, D-Wave had $61.8 million in available issuance capacity under the equity line of credit.



D-Wave's ability to raise additional funds under the equity line credit is subject to a number of conditions, including having a sufficient number of registered shares and D-Wave stock price being above $1 per share. On May 31, 2024, the S3 registration statement was partially used for a $100 million at-the-market program. As of June 30, 2024, D-Wave had $90.7 million of issuance capacity under the ATM and had a total of $152.5 million in common stock issuance capacity under the ELOC and ATM on a combined basis as well as an additional $75 million in unallocated capacity under the S3 shelf registration statement.



Subsequent to the end of the second quarter, D-Wave began paying down the term loan with PSP IB units investments with payments totaling approximately $15.8 million, leaving a loan balance of about $18.6 million as of today. We are reiterating the full year 2024 financial guidance set forth in our March 28, 2024, fiscal 2023 Fourth quarter and full-year earnings press release. Our guidance is subject to various cautionary factors described below. Based on the information available on August 7, 2024, guidance for the full year 2024 is as follows: -- we expect the fiscal 2024 adjusted EBITDA loss to be less than the fiscal 2023 adjusted EBITDA loss of $54.3 million.



To conclude, as we have previously stated, -- we believe that D-Wave has the opportunity to be the first independent publicly held quantum computing company to achieve sustained profitability and to achieve this milestone with substantially less funding than required by any other independent publicly held quantum computing company. With that, we will now open the call for questions.

[Operator]

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] If you have more questions, please rejoin the queue. One moment, please, for your first question... [Audio Gap] Your first question is from the line of Craig Ellis from B. Riley Securities.

[Craig Ellis, analyst]

And guys, congratulations on the technical and commercial progress as well as joining the Russell 3000, Nice to see. Alan, I wanted to start with just a follow-up to the point you made on AI development and better understand what the road map progress and the Zapata partnership agreement mean for really the timing to broadening commercial engagements since that's been one of the strengths of the company? And what some of the milestones are that we observe or should keep in mind as you go down that path?

[Alan Baratz, executive]

Sure. Thanks, Craig, for the question. Actually, before I answer the question, I think I need to correct a misstatement that I made earlier, although John said it properly, that our cash balance at the end of the second quarter was a little over $40 million. I may have misstated it as $50 million, but $40 million is the correct number. So I just wanted to correct that. With respect to your question, Craig, so more and more of our customers are asking us how we can, a, help to improve their AI machine learning initiatives; and b, combine AI machine learning with our optimization capabilities.



The example of the latter that I often like to use is AI is good at being predictive, so you could predict demand for products over some future period and then use Quantum Optimization to optimize the supply chain in support of that demand. So based on these customer requests, we really started thinking through how we could help our customers to better leverage AI and machine learning. And based on work that we had actually been doing ourselves and with some of our customers, what we realize is that we have opportunities in 3 areas. One is to help our customers build more accurate models by leveraging quantum distributions in the training of those models rather than classical distributions; two, develop AI machine learning models with much less energy consumption because our quantum computers are very energy efficient compared to GPUs, which are used pretty much exclusively to train models today.



And then third, as I said, bring together AI machine learning with Quantum Optimization. And we've got some early proof points in each of these areas as we've talked about some work that we've been doing with Triumph, which is a leading scientific research and decision in Canada as well as some other companies that are starting to demonstrate the fact that we can be successful in all 3 of those areas. And then, of course, Zapata AI has some software that actually can be used to get a quick start on doing this quantum AI integration for model training. So essentially, what the roadmap constitute is, a, enhancing the lead cloud service with more GPU capability so that as soon as possible, our customers can leverage our Leaf cloud service, not just for Quantum Optimization but also for AI model training even if only classically to start, then b, integrating the quantum computations with AI machine learning to kind of enable that integrated machine learning, Quantum Optimization capability.



And then finally, actually leveraging the Quantum computers in support of doing the model training to be able to deliver better models. So that's essentially how we are focused on supporting our customers and rolling out capabilities through our LEAP Cloud service.

[Craig Ellis, analyst]

Yes, a lot there, and it makes sense. Alan and then, John, I just wanted to cycle back to the point on bookings and make sure I get the bookings math based on the numbers that you provided. So it sounds like with the increase in bookings, but the duration difference. We've got a sustained low 3 million forward 12-month visibility to bookings. So $3.233 billion up forward 12 months. But where we are today is that the visibility beyond that looks like it's up about 2.5x versus 6 months ago with about $5 million of visibility versus $2 million 6 months ago. Is that math correct?

[John Markovich, executive]

The numbers I referenced earlier, Craig, was a remaining performance obligations as of the end of June of $8.1, and I compare that to $5 million as of the end of the fourth quarter. So a $3.1 million increase, but the composition of bookings changed rather significantly as a result of the longer-term QCAS bookings. And this is broken out and this sort of broken out in great detail in the queue that we'll file later today. Does that answer your question?

[Craig Ellis, analyst]

Yes It does, but it sounds like my math is right. Given the change in timing distribution, that means that with the big increase, a lot of that has occurred beyond 12 months to give people longer-term visibility on the business. -- appreciate helpful hop back in the queue. Actually, let me sneak one more in. I didn't hear, John, a breakout between revenue...

[Alan Baratz, executive]

Craig, I apologize. We're starting to run late. So I think we're going to have to... Sorry. Let's go to the next question, please.

[Operator]

Your next question is from the line of Quinn Bolton from Needham.

[Quinn Bolton, analyst]

Let me also offer my congratulations on the continued progress. Alan and John, you guys mentioned sort of the change in the sales force leadership and resulting changes to the sales organization. It sounds like it's had some near-term impact. I'm wondering if you see that impact really more affecting just the bookings activity has it actually impacted revenue. And you mentioned you sort of thought that it would -- those effects would sort of dissipate by the end of the year. So should we infer that as we get into the fourth quarter and certainly into the first couple of quarters of next year that you would expect an acceleration in bookings activity now that you have the sales force realigned?

[Alan Baratz, executive]

So obviously, we're not giving guidance on bookings. But I think the fact that we are significantly ramping up staffing in the go-to-market arena and specifically bringing in skills in the areas John to outline the verticals as well as the application areas that your characterization is reasonable.

[Quinn Bolton, analyst]

Perfect. And then I'll throw a technical question, but you mentioned the bills any quality violation and it allows you to explore digital and analog quantum computing. Just what's sort of, if you could, Alan, double it down for those of us that aren't quantum experts. What's the importance of that, especially sort of an analog versus digital capability? What does that bring to customers? Or how does that allow you to expand the application use case of a needle...

[Alan Baratz, executive]

Yes. So first of all, let me just take a second and say, when we say digital and analog, what I'm about to say is pretty close to accurate. It's not 100% accurate, but it's pretty close. Essentially, what we're saying is combining [indiscernible] type computation with annealing type computation, all within our annealing fabric. Now what's the significance of that? As I mentioned, the significance of that is that it will allow us to generate quantum distributions that are, in some sense, richer than what we can generate with annealing exclusively. And that will have significant benefits in areas like machine learning, model training. And I think I talked about this briefly in the past, but doing some exploration in the area of passing functions. These kinds of rich quantum distributions can be very helpful there as well. So think about energy-efficient hashing functions.

[Quinn Bolton, analyst]

Perfect, thank you.

[Operator]

Your next question is from the line of Richard Shannon from Craig-Hallum.

[Unknown Analyst]

Great, Alan, John... I'm going to follow up on some comments from John, but the question really is more for Alan here. John, you detailed some changes to the go-to-market sales force in the context of bookings and kind of changes there. I guess my question really for Alan here is going back to the analyst event back in January, you talked about a goal of increasing time to revenues and time to solution for customers here. Maybe you can give us context here in the sales force changes being made here. They're affecting bookings. How has that also helped? Or maybe just give us an update on how you think your progress is going in terms of accelerating the time to solution from your sales force?

[Alan Baratz, executive]

Yes... Yes. So I think the -- as I said at the analyst conference, the approach of focusing on some key verticals and some key use cases, we believe and believe accelerates time to production by allowing us to get the benefits of reuse. In other words, we learn from developing a use case with him for one customer, we can bring those learnings to the next customer and get better at it and the next customer and so on, ultimately being able to move faster and helps customers get into production more quickly. And that is still our view and our goal, but it does take some time.



I mean this whole notion of learning from reuse means that we need to learn and we need to reuse. So by staying focused, we're making progress toward that end, but it does take some time. And then, of course, as we introduced the new verticalization strategy, it we needed to, in some sense, tool up the go-to-market organization with the skills in those vertical areas and use cases to be able to be effective in selling and supporting customers in those areas. And that's all work that we started to put in place as we were coming through the analyst conference in January.



One of the early and most important steps was to hire our new Chief Revenue Officer, Lorenzo Martinelli, who has a strong background in this area and has kind of worked to, if you like, determine how to best retool the go-to-market organization, and that's now all starting to get implemented, including significant focus on staffing. We will over double the go-to-market staffing over the course of the remainder of this year.

[Unknown Analyst]

Okay. Alan, a follow-up on that seems very interesting dynamics there. My follow-on question is touching on the fast annealing feature. Your press release mentioned you've got 2.5 million problems up from $0.5 million problems that you mentioned at the conference call a quarter ago, obviously, impressive growth there. I guess maybe just be interesting to hear some perspective on what this exactly means from both in sales and a technology seasoning perspective here. I'm guessing there's probably not much of any real sales associated with this, but maybe you could help us understand and what you expect from all these problems being submitted and how this helps advance your technology platform?

[Alan Baratz, executive]

Yes. So maybe 2 comments. First, the fast anneal capability, combined with the 1,200-Advantage system that's now available in our cloud service was the platform that we used to achieve the Quantum supremacy result. We tried to do that work on the advantage system, a 5,000 cubic advantage system, but it really required the 1,200 cubic advantage tube processor with that anneal because of the longer coherence times. And the longer coherent signs, combined with the fast anneal means that essentially, we can get 2 solutions faster because we know that the rate to optimality is much faster when we are doing coherent quantum annealing.



When the annealing process is running while the system is coherent. And so the combination of the longer coherent kinds in the Advantage2 processor with the fast anneal, right, so that the anneal is not living outside of the coherence times, and we're starting to see impact of the external environment, we can get to solutions much faster. So on the one hand, it gave us the quantum supremacy result, which has been invaluable in getting the government, the U.S. government and other governments around the world excited about finally starting to get engaged with D-Wave, so opening up more opportunities for us there. It's also been a supporting message for the commercial market as they get more and more comfort with our technology being able to do things that can't be done classically. And then secondarily and maybe even more directly, it just means that we are able to deliver better solutions faster to their commercial optimization problems...

[Unknown Analyst]

Great. I'm going to unpack that one a little bit later, but that's all the questions from you guys. Thanks.

[Alan Baratz, executive]

Thanks...

[Operator]

Due to time, we will only allow one question then ask you to rejoin the queue for follow-up questions -- your next question is from the line of David Williams from Benchmark.

[David Williams, analyst]

I guess maybe for John. Revenue was below expectation, I believe, below where you guided, and you talked a little bit about this, but I'm just wondering if maybe you can help us understand how you typically expect maybe bookings to convert to revenue? And then how much of your business is generally a turns business or businesses captured during that quarter?

[John Markovich, executive]

David, I think you stated revenue guidance, which, for clarity, we have not provided any revenue guidance. We provided an EBITDA guidance on the year. As I mentioned earlier, the composition of our bookings has changed rather significantly in the first half of the year, which has changed the historical relationship between bookings and when that revenue is recognized. As of the end of December, when we look at our revenue backlog at that point, 73% of the revenue would be recognized in the subsequent 12 months. As of the end of June, that number had dropped to 42%, meaning that the balance of 58% is stretched out over the next couple of years.



So the average contract term has lengthened rather significantly. And the bulk of that backlog is QCAS revenue, so the higher-margin QCAS contracts. So that relationship is going to be a function of whatever the composition of the bookings is at any given point in time. Does that answer your question?

[David Williams, analyst]

It does...

[Operator]

Your next question is from the line of Suji Desilva from Roth Capital.

[Sujeeva De Silva, analyst]

Congrats on the progress here. I'm curious on the new sales structure. If this will help improve or accelerate land and expand efforts at the customers, maybe a customer -- revenue per customer metric in the future might show there. And particularly, Alan, the verticals of optimization, AI research and infrastructure. I'm curious how those, in particular, are going to play out in terms of healthier...

[Alan Baratz, executive]

Yes. So actually, the land and expand is working quite well. We've got currently 6 or 7 PS engagements in flight with commercial customers. I talked about Ford Otosan. I talked about Hermes. In the past, we've talked about Vinci. We've talked about MasterCard. And we are progressing all of those. And so we're feeling quite good actually about that component of the model.



Once we get engaged and we start working with the customer through the professional services organization, the PS team is phenomenal. They're always delivering good results. And then as a result, the customers start looking to, okay, how do I move this into production or what's the next application? So all the changes that Lorenzo is making are, in some sense, more oriented toward growing the customer base as opposed to land and expand. And with respect to AIML, again, this just simply makes our capabilities richer and the application is more valuable in the verticals that we've already said, we want to go after manufacturing, logistics, especially logistics and government.

[Operator]

Your next question is from the line of Harsh Kumar from Piper Sandler.

[Harsh Kumar, analyst]

Actually, the last answer might chime in to the question that I'm asking. But Alan, I noticed that your bookings were up very nicely. And I was curious what kind of companies end markets or customers are signing up incrementally with you? In other words, what industries are showing most interest in signing up with your company.

[Alan Baratz, executive]

So... It really does continue to focus on the verticals that we've talked about. We knew at the beginning of this year that those represented the low-hanging fruit, the areas where we thought we could deliver the most value fastest. And we are having success in signing up those customers in those industries over other industries. It's just that we need to be even more effective, move even faster and be signing up more customers in a given period of time.



But it is those areas with the notable addition of government. And there really has been a rapidly increasing interest from government and our technology, and that is opening up opportunities there for us as well. The question... Left. So if we want to cycle back around, if Suji maybe -- or David, I guess, would be next, if you wanted to ask a second question...



Guys, can you hear me?

[David Williams, analyst]

Yes.

[Alan Baratz, executive]

Yes.

[David Williams, analyst]

Great. Just kind of curious, Alan, if you could speak to -- you've got some really not innovation here, very solid on the technology front, but just kind of wondering how your customers view that? And if you could speak to maybe the key areas that resonate most you think as you're acquiring customers.

[Alan Baratz, executive]

Yes. So when we're talking about the use cases in the vertical areas, what they really care about is how well can we solve their problems. And it's really us being able to leverage our new technologies to be able to solve their problems faster and with greater precision. And -- but at the end of the day, what they care about is solving the problems, what we care about is having a technology that allows us to do that really well. If we're talking about government and research, they want to play with the technologies. That's really what's going on with all our competitors, right? It's basically governments playing with the technologies because I can't really do anything useful with them. But now we've got some really exciting enhanced capabilities that is generating a site government and research excitement for us as well.

[Operator]

Your next follow-up question is from the line of Greg Ellis.

[Unknown Analyst]

John, can you help us with the breakout of QCAS versus professional services in the quarter even if qualitatively?

[John Markovich, executive]

Sure. So for the quarter, QCAS revenue represented about 81% of the total revenue, whereas professional services represented 16%...

[Unknown Analyst]

Thank you.

[Alan Baratz, executive]

Okay. We're pretty much at time now. So let me just close out by saying that our second quarter results show continued progress and momentum on all fronts, revenue, liquidity and technical advancements. There's rapidly growing awareness of annealing Quantum computing and its ability to deliver business benefits today, and this is further strengthened by our product development activities in hardware, software and Quantum Artificial Intelligence. Our momentum is one of the few companies in the world leading the Quantum transformation is evident, and we thank you all for your time today...

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.