IonQ, a pure-play quantum computing company backed by Samsung Electronics and other global tech leaders has gone public on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company closed out its first trading day on Friday (local time in New York) with a market capitalization of $345 million.

Headquartered in Maryland, the U.S., IonQ was founded in 2015 by Duke University engineering professors Jungsang Kim and Chris Monroe based on 25 years of research. It is the only company with its quantum systems available through the cloud on Amazon Braket, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, according to IonQ.

The company combined business with dMY Technology Group, Inc., a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, last Thursday, securing $636 million in gross proceeds for investment in future growth projects and commercialization of its quantum computers, said IonQ in a press release on Friday.

IonQ raised $55 million in a funding round in 2019, which was led by Samsung Catalyst Fund, a venture capital fund run by South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co., and Mubadala Capital, a sovereign wealth fund backed by the United Arab Emirates. Its other investors include Amazon Web Services and GV (formerly known as Google Ventures).

A quantum computer is a machine that uses the properties of quantum physics to store data and perform computations. It is hailed as the next big breakthrough in data processing for its ability to perform problem-solving operations, which could take a normal computer millions of years, in seconds.

By Park Yong-beom, Lee Sang-deok and Cho Jeehyun

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