IonQ was co-founded by Christopher Monroe and Jungsang Kim, professors at Duke University,[1] in 2015,[2] with the help of Harry Weller and Andrew Schoen, partners at venture firm New Enterprise Associates.

[2] 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[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.

[19][20] 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 November 2017, IonQ presented a paper at the IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing describing their technology strategy and current progress.

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.