IonQ
| File:IonQ corp logo.svg | |
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| NYSE: IONQ | |
| Industry | Quantum computing |
| Founders |
|
| Headquarters | College Park, Maryland, US |
Key people | Niccolo de Masi (President and CEO) Peter Chapman (Executive Chair) |
| Products | Trapped ion quantum computation |
| Website | ionq |
IonQ, Inc. is a United States-based company specializing in both hardware and software for quantum computing, headquartered in College Park, Maryland. The firm focuses on creating general-purpose trapped ion quantum computer systems alongside software designed to generate, refine, and implement quantum circuits.
History
Founded in 2015 by professors Christopher Monroe and Jungsang Kim of Duke University, IonQ was established with backing from venture capitalists Harry Weller and Andrew Schoen from New Enterprise Associates. The enterprise builds upon the founders’ combined 25 years of scholarly research in the field of quantum information science. Monroe’s pioneering work at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with Nobel Prize winner David Wineland resulted in the development of the first controllable qubits and quantum logic gates employing trapped ions, which form the cornerstone of IonQ’s system design.
The collaboration between Kim and Monroe was formalized through projects funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), merging Monroe’s expertise in trapped ions with Kim’s emphasis on scalable quantum hardware solutions. Their 2013 publication in Science, titled Scaling the Ion Trap Quantum Processor, served as a foundational document for IonQ’s technological approach. In 2015, New Enterprise Associates committed $2 million to advance commercialization efforts based on this research.
David Moehring joined IonQ as CEO in 2016 after his tenure at IARPA, where he managed multiple quantum research programs. The company secured $20 million in Series B funding in 2017, led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) and New Enterprise Associates—marking GV’s inaugural investment in quantum computing technology. That year, IonQ significantly expanded its workforce with the goal of delivering a market-ready product by late 2018.
In May 2019, Peter Chapman, previously an executive at Amazon Prime, assumed the role of CEO. IonQ established partnerships with leading cloud service providers—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud—to enable public access to its quantum computing platforms.
IonQ went public on the New York Stock Exchange in October 2021 through a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) transaction. In February 2024, the company inaugurated a dedicated research and development center located in Bothell, Washington, positioning it as the first dedicated quantum computing manufacturing facility within the United States.
In June 2025, IonQ announced plans to acquire Oxford Ionics, a British quantum technology startup, for an estimated $1.1 billion.
Technology
IonQ’s quantum systems are based on a trapped ion architecture developed from the foundational work of Monroe at the University of Maryland and Kim at Duke University. During the IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing held in November 2017, IonQ outlined its technological roadmap emphasizing their use of microfabricated ion traps combined with optical and acousto-optical components for cooling, state initialization, and computation processes. Additionally, they introduced a cloud-accessible API alongside custom language interfaces and quantum simulators that exploit the full connectivity inherent to trapped ion qubit systems.
According to IonQ and several experts in the field, trapped ion qubits provide benefits over other qubit modalities regarding precision, scalability potential, operational reliability, and coherence duration. Nonetheless, some critics highlight drawbacks such as slower gate operation speeds and larger physical hardware requirements relative to competing qubit technologies.