Quantum computing firm IonQ Inc. today announced that the company will go public by way of a merger with dMY Technology Group Inc. III, a so-called special-purpose acquisition company.

Upon closing the deal, IonQ will begin trading under the symbol “IONQ” as a publicly traded pure-play hardware and software company in the quantum computing market.

The deal, which gives IonQ a valuation of about $2 billion, will also provide the company gross proceeds of $650 million, including $350 million provided by institutional investors such as Fidelity Management & Research Co. LLC, Silver Lake, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, MSD Partners L.P., Hyundai Motor Co., Kia Corp. and others.

SPACs, of which dMY is one, are also known as blank-check companies since they’re created solely to raise money through an initial public offering to acquire another company. They’ve become a wildly popular alternative to traditional IPOs in the past year or so.

Quantum computing differs from classical computing in that it addresses information using phenomena of superposition and entanglement to perform computation. Quantum computers are believed to be able to solve certain computational problems, such as integer factorization, which underlies certain cryptographic concerns, substantially faster than traditional computers.

“This transaction advances IonQ’s mission, to solve critical problems that impact nearly every aspect of society,” said Peter Chapman, chief executive and president of IonQ and former director of engineering for Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Prime business. “With our key strategic partners, such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Hyundai Motor Company and Kia Corporation, we look forward to leveraging the power of quantum computing in the fight against climate change and to solve vexing problems from materials design to logistics that impact the transportation industry.”

IonQ’s plan has been to commercialize access to quantum computing by putting quantum computers onto the cloud. To provide for this challenge, IonQ is building the world’s best quantum computers and making them available via Amazon Inc.’s Bracket and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure.

Developers get direct access to develop for and run software on the cloud and provision qubits – the basic resource that is analogous to bits, the traditional “1s” and “0s” of traditional computing. Except in the case of quantum computing the answers can sometimes be fuzzy, and that’s what makes it powerful.

To make its software and hardware as accessible as possible, IonQ also provides a software development kit that works with most popular cloud providers, libraries and tools. Developers do not need to spend much time pouring over their work to take their applications to the next level.

The potential applications for quantum computing run the same gamut as classical computing, although quantum computers do a better job of predicting “fuzzy” problems that could have more than one potential outcome that branch. For example, quantum computing will have strong applications in machine learning and artificial intelligence, computational chemistry and drug development, financial modeling, logistics optimization (such as provisioning and movement modeling) and weather forecasting.

To date, quantum computing efforts have also been part of much larger enterprise companies such as IBM Corp. with the IBM Q Network, Microsoft Corp. with Azure Quantum, Honeywell International Inc. with its 10-qubit System H1 and Google LLC with its 53-qubit Sycamore research chip.

IonQ will put its powerful 32-qubit quantum computer into play and the company will use the money to continue research into miniaturizing and maturing its technology. This miniaturization would allow the company to develop modular quantum computers small enough to be networked together, which the company expects to be available by 2023.

Photo: IonQ