D-Wave Brand Guidelines: A 1999 Vancouver Start, Quantum Annealing & a Move to Nasdaq

Four founders, a superconductor and a university lab.

D-Wave was founded in 1999 in Vancouver by Haig Farris, Geordie Rose, Bob Wiens and Alexandre Zagoskin, according to English Wikipedia. Farris taught a business course at the University of British Columbia, where Rose earned his doctorate and Zagoskin was a postdoctoral fellow, and the company began as an offshoot of the university, working from sites around Vancouver and from laboratory space at UBC before moving to Burnaby, the neighbouring suburb. The name, Wikipedia says, refers to its first qubit designs, which used d-wave superconductors.

In its early years D-Wave funded academic research and built a network of university partners, including UBC, the Université de Sherbrooke and the University of Toronto. On 13 February 2007 it demonstrated a 16-qubit prototype called Orion at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, running a molecule search, a seating plan and a Sudoku puzzle; Wikipedia notes that a later chip from that year was fabricated at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Microdevices Lab in Pasadena.

The company describes itself as “the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers.” On 11 May 2011 it announced the D-Wave One, a 128-qubit system, and Lockheed Martin signed a multi-year contract that included buying one, Wikipedia says. In May 2013 NASA, Google and the Universities Space Research Association opened a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA Ames built around a 512-qubit D-Wave Two, and on 17 February 2014 the company appeared on the cover of Time.

Annealing first, gate-model later.

D-Wave’s machines are built for a specialised method called quantum annealing, a way of finding low-energy solutions to optimisation problems, rather than as general-purpose, gate-model quantum computers. Its processors are superconducting circuits of coupled flux qubits, Wikipedia says. English Wikipedia traces the generations: the D-Wave 2X, made generally available in August 2015 with more than 1,000 qubits; the 2000Q of January 2017; and the Leap cloud service, launched in 2018 so that customers could use the machines remotely. Today the company names Advantage2 as its annealing system and offers an open-source software kit called Ocean.

The approach has always drawn argument. Wikipedia records that a research team led by Matthias Troyer and Daniel Lidar found evidence of quantum annealing in the D-Wave One but no speed-up over classical computers. In March 2025 D-Wave said it had reached what it called “quantum supremacy” on a magnetic-materials simulation, published in Science; Wikipedia, citing The Wall Street Journal, notes that some physicists questioned the claim and that critics saw the problem as chosen to suit the machine.

Its systems sit in research centres as well as in the cloud. In 2025 the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany installed an Advantage system, and scientists there published work on it in Nature, according to Wikipedia. The company’s own customer list names Pattison Food Group, Ford Otosan, BASF and Shionogi, and it describes uses such as workforce scheduling, logistics routing and drug discovery.

In January 2026 D-Wave completed its purchase of Quantum Circuits Inc., a developer of error-corrected superconducting gate-model systems based on what it calls dual-rail qubits, The Quantum Insider reported on 20 January 2026. Quantum Circuits co-founder Rob Schoelkopf became D-Wave’s chief scientist, and the company now calls itself a “dual-platform” quantum computing company, building both annealing and gate-model machines.

Design and documentation.

Quantum computing companies sell machines that few customers will ever see, so their pictures carry much of the explaining. The most familiar image is the dilution refrigerator: a tiered, gold-coloured structure of plates and cables that looks a little like a chandelier when its outer casings are removed. Rigetti’s website, for one, walks visitors through such a refrigerator, naming the gold-plated copper plates that separate its temperature stages.

Each hardware approach has its own pictures. Companies that trap ions or neutral atoms tend to show vacuum chambers, laser tables and optical benches, often lit so that the beams and windows glow; makers of superconducting and silicon devices show chip close-ups and wafers, frequently under blue or violet light. Photonic companies show the optical chips and fibres that carry their qubits. Alongside the hardware come people: physicists and engineers at racks of control electronics, oscilloscopes and laptops.

Because qubits themselves cannot be photographed in any ordinary sense, the sector also leans on abstraction. Renderings of glowing spheres, lattices, interference patterns and waves stand in for superposition and entanglement, and dark backgrounds with points of coloured light are common across websites, investor presentations and conference stands.

Those conferences are part of the visual record too. IEEE Quantum Week, whose 2026 edition its organisers set in Toronto, gathers researchers and engineers around technical papers and workshops, while Q2B, which lists 2026 meetings in Tokyo, Copenhagen and Chicago, presents itself as a place to connect quantum technology with business. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it and where its machines are built — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a SPAC to Nasdaq, and from Palo Alto to Florida.

D-Wave changed leadership before it went public. Alan Baratz replaced the long-time chief executive Vern Brownell in 2020, BetaKit reported. The company then listed through a special purpose acquisition company: after completing its business combination with DPCM Capital, the new parent, D-Wave Quantum Inc., made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol QBTS on Monday 8 August 2022, BetaKit reported that day. It had announced the SPAC plan in February 2022.

In July 2026 it moved exchanges. Its shares stopped trading on the New York Stock Exchange at the close on 24 July and began trading on Nasdaq on 27 July 2026, keeping the QBTS symbol, The Quantum Insider reported on 15 July 2026, and English Wikipedia records Baratz ringing the Nasdaq opening bell that day.

The company has also been moving its base. Wikipedia describes it as having locations in Palo Alto, California, and Burnaby, British Columbia. On 27 January 2026 D-Wave announced that it had chosen Boca Raton, Florida, for a new corporate headquarters and research facility at the Boca Raton Innovation Campus, and that it planned to move its headquarters there from Palo Alto before the end of 2026; the same release lists a gate-model research centre in New Haven, Connecticut, a Quantum Engineering Center of Excellence in Burnaby, and systems in Marina Del Rey, California, and Huntsville, Alabama. Its website now lists Boca Raton as headquarters, marked “coming soon,” alongside Palo Alto. The company says it has more than 375 employees and more than 250 granted US patents.

For a design guide, D-Wave shows how a hardware company can build its story around one distinctive method and keep its name, taken from a superconductor, through every change of listing and address. Compare Quantinuum, which took the trapped-ion route, and Rigetti, another maker of superconducting quantum chips. For this guide we use navy, frost and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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