History
IonQ was co-founded by Christopher Monroe and Jungsang Kim, professors at Duke University, [2] in 2015, [3] with the help of Harry Weller and Andrew Schoen, partners at venture firm New Enterprise Associates. [4]
The company is an offshoot of the co-founders’ 25 years of academic research in quantum information science. [3] Monroe's quantum computing research began as a Staff Researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with Nobel-laureate physicist David Wineland [5] where he led a team using trapped ions to produce the first controllable qubits and the first controllable quantum logic gate, [6] culminating in a proposed architecture for a large-scale trapped ion computer. [7]
Kim and Monroe began collaborating formally as a result of larger research initiatives funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). [8] They wrote a review paper [8] for Science Magazine entitled Scaling the Ion Trap Quantum Processor, [9] pairing Monroe's research in trapped ions with Kim's focus on scalable quantum information processing and quantum communication hardware. [10]
This research partnership became the seed for IonQ's founding. In 2015, New Enterprise Associates invested $2 million to commercialize the technology Monroe and Kim proposed in their Science paper. [4]
In 2016, they brought on David Moehring from IARPA—where he was in charge of several quantum computing initiatives [11] [4] —to be the company's chief executive. [3] In 2017, they raised a $20 million series B, led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) and New Enterprise Associates, the first investment GV has made in quantum computing technology. [12] They began hiring in earnest in 2017, [13] with the intent to bring an offering to market by late 2018. [3] [14] In May 2019, former Amazon Prime executive Peter Chapman was named new CEO of the company. [15] [16] IonQ then partnered to make its quantum computers available to the public through Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. [17] [18] [19]
In October 2021, IonQ became publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange via a special-purpose acquisition company. [20] [21] The company opened a dedicated research and development facility in Bothell, Washington, in February 2024, touting it as the first quantum computing factory in the United States. [22]
In June 2025, IonQ agreed to acquire British quantum computing startup, Oxford Ionics, for approximately $1.1 billion. [23]
Technology
IonQ's hardware is based on a trapped ion architecture, from technology that Monroe developed at the University of Maryland, and that Kim developed at Duke. [24]
In November 2017, IonQ presented a paper at the IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing describing their technology strategy and current progress. It outlines using a microfabricated ion trap and several optical and acousto-optical systems to cool, initialize, and calculate. They also describe a cloud API, custom language bindings, and quantum computing simulators that take advantage of their trapped ion system's complete connectivity. [25]
IonQ and some experts claim that trapped ions could provide a number of benefits over other physical qubit types in several measures, such as accuracy, scalability, predictability, and coherence time. [26] [3] [27] Others criticize the slow operational times and relative size of trapped ion hardware, claiming other qubit technologies are just as promising. [26]
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