Quantum computer company IonQ makes its Wall Street debut

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The first quantum computer company to go public debuted on Wall Street Friday, marking a milestone in a technology that until recently was in the field for many years.

IonQ’s listing on the stock exchange is through a merger with a special acquisition company, or Spac, as much larger amounts of capital flow into quantum businesses as hopes grow that rudimentary forms of technology will soon solve everyday problems for businesses.

Quantum computers use the strange effects of quantum mechanics to process information in a way that massively speeds up certain types of calculations. But the difficulty of controlling the qubits at the heart of the systems has made it difficult to build systems large enough to take practical advantage of the effects.

After IonQ was privately owned 82 million PsiQuantum, which builds quantum computers with another photon-based technology, in its first six years, IonQ raised $ 450 million in private funding earlier this year. Honeywell has agreed to invest US $ 300 million in a new quantum unit after the merger with the UK company Cambridge Quantum Computing.

Peter Chapman, the former Amazon executive who runs IonQ, predicts that his company’s quantum machines will be able to keep up with the world’s fastest supercomputers “in a few years.”

Software designed to work with the machines and run simulations has already demonstrated its superiority over traditional computers, Chapman said. Much of the focus has been on using a quantum computer to cut the time it takes to train a machine learning model, he added. However, the quantum systems that can execute these algorithms have yet to make the transition from scientific experiment to large-scale production.

IonQ is forecasting a rapid escalation of its business by the middle of this decade, with sales jumping 60 million in daily operations, Chapman said.

The ability to forecast well into the future is one of the main attractions of going public through a Spac, and IonQ may not have been able to list under the stricter regulatory restrictions for companies aiming for a standard IPO, he added added.

Chapman acknowledged that the technology carries much higher risk than normal stock market investments, but added, “We have reached a point where companies need to be perfect before they go public. Much of the risk has been removed, but much of the return has also been eliminated. ”

IonQ’s shares ended the day at $ 9.20 and valued the company at approximately $ 1.7 billion. The price was 15 percent below the level at which the Spac had traded before the deal closed.