The company is an offshoot of the co-founders’ 25 years of academic research in quantum information science.[2] Monroe's quantum computing research began as a Staff Researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with Nobel-laureate physicistDavid Wineland[4] where he led a team using trapped ions to produce the first controllable qubits and the first controllable quantum logic gate,[5] culminating in a proposed architecture for a large-scale trapped ion computer.[6]
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.[3]
In 2016, they brought on David Moehring from IARPA—where he was in charge of several quantum computing initiatives[10][3]—to be the company's chief executive.[2] 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.[11] They began hiring in earnest in 2017,[12] with the intent to bring an offering to market by late 2018.[2][13]
In May 2019, former Amazon Prime executive Peter Chapman was named new CEO of the company.[14][15] IonQ then partnered to make its quantum computers available to the public through Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.[16][17][18]
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.[22]
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 microfabricatedion 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[23]
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.[24][2][25] Others criticize the slow operational times and relative size of trapped ion hardware, claiming other qubit technologies are just as promising.[24]
^Popkin, Gabriel (1 December 2016). "Scientists are close to building a quantum computer that can beat a conventional one". Science. doi:10.1126/science.aal0442.