For a pre-revenue battery developer, the runway is the business model. QuantumScape's Q1 2026 Form 10-Q, with the XBRL facts pulled via EdgarBeast, reports cash and equivalents of roughly $145.1 million at March 31, 2026 — down from about $230.5 million at year-end 2025. That is a drop of roughly $85 million in three months.
Against that, the same filing carries quarterly research and development expense of about $84.6 million. The symmetry is hard to miss: the cash-balance decline this quarter is close to a full quarter of R&D. A company that spends roughly its cash drawdown on development each quarter is a company whose timeline is a financing timeline.
One important caveat the headline cash line hides: companies like QuantumScape typically hold additional liquidity in marketable securities beyond cash and equivalents, so the $145.1 million figure is the most-liquid slice, not total liquidity. The full picture lives in the balance sheet and liquidity discussion of the FY2025 10-K; the cash line alone understates the cushion.
Even so, the direction is the signal. The Q3 2025 10-Q and the 2025 10-K show R&D running at a high-hundreds-of-millions annual pace, against a cash position measured in the low hundreds of millions. That gap is exactly why a commercialization-stage battery company's equity story is so sensitive to each capital raise, licensing milestone, and burn-rate update.
No recommendation — runway, not rating. The reconciled read: QuantumScape burned through a meaningful share of its cash balance in Q1 2026 while spending heavily on R&D, and total liquidity beyond the cash line is what determines how many quarters that buys. Figures from the 10-Q at sec.gov, indexed by EdgarBeast.