It was hard to follow. See, you could have told us we could have put on some ballroom. You could have, you know, got you a partner and done a little...
I tried to get a partner. We could have got Tammy to come up and dance. I did try, you know, we could have done it. Honor and pleasure to be here. So great to see everyone.
No, man. Thank you for taking the time. I know you're running a small little company down the street, so appreciate you taking a little time.
So on that, a couple of things. What keeps you going? What keeps Niccolo going? What keeps you going day to day?
So I'm a physicist originally and I caught the quantum computing bug actually reading Dr. Chris Monroe's paper in '95 when he was working at the University of Maryland early on. And it's a paper that — how many physicists are in the audience? Mathematicians, computer scientists, everybody know the paper I'm referring to. Bell quality, Bell, you know, Bell inequality violations.
It's a high read. Yes, I can read it.
So if you were a physicist — and I was an undergrad at the time — and you heard about this paper, it was like a lightning rod, you know, if you will, through the community because it demonstrated the first sort of empirical proof of what Dr. Richard Feynman wrote out in the early 1970s: these crazy ideas that you could have a quantum computer and a completely secure quantum network.
And so, believe it or not, I finished university. I don't have a PhD in physics. I bailed out at the master's degree. And unfortunately, I'm not a Terp. I went to Cambridge University, but if I had been in the US at the time, it would have been here. Would have been here for sure.
There you go. There you go.
I'm sure Dr. Pines will get you — you know, he can get you. At this point, I'm hoping for that honorary doctorate, but you know, we'll see. We'll see.
And so I sort of said to myself, you know, hey, this quantum computing stuff might take a little while to percolate. But I really believed throughout my career that the 2020s was going to be when quantum computing became, you know, a prime time event.
And so, believe it or not, you know, this is my 14th public company that I've been the chairman or CEO, lead director of. I've worked in a few industries, but I've always kept an eye on the development of quantum computing, and a lot of my friends from university stayed in academia and this sector. And so I am delighted by the fact that we got into the late teens, let's call it, of the 21st century, things really started to accelerate.
You know, I took IonQ public with my blank check company, or SPAC, in 2020. And like I said, the rest is history, but certainly that was a catalyzing moment of capital formation because we delivered $645 million to Dr. Monroe's private startup that at the time only had about 35 people.
So, a lot there we're going to unpack, but I want to — as you heard, I'm an engineer by training, computer science by training, and I consider myself a Marvel, Star Trek kind of guy, a nerd, because my wife likes to call me a nerd. I'm a nerd. So, you know, quantum is in all the comics and all the movies and everybody wants to talk about quantum, but explain quantum as if we got a bunch of second graders in here so people can really understand what the heck this thing quantum really is, and not what the movies tell us, but what quantum — and by the way, what IonQ is doing to bring quantum to life.
Yeah. So to some extent this is a revolutionary technology that you don't actually have to understand the technical details of any more than you have to understand what happened with CPUs when Intel was king of the world in the 80s and 90s, and right now with Nvidia and GPUs. Quantum — the business of quantum is what IonQ is in. And whilst we were started as a quantum computing only company, and that is the core business, as President Pines aptly pointed out, we've expanded the vision dramatically. So we are the leading quantum computing company, we're the leading quantum networking and security company, we're also the leading quantum sensing company. And the last year we've expanded the vision sufficiently that we can do all of those business lines or product families both on the ground and up in space because we also own a satellite signals platform.
Each of those is a slightly different application of quantum. And I'm not going to spend time talking about really what quantum means in theory. What it means in practice is we are building the future of what we call the quantum internet. And so if you think about the last, I don't know, 100 years of history, you know, we had of course the Enlightenment and the Renaissance and the Age of Information, then happened the 20th century, we had an agricultural revolution. I think the 21st century is the quantum renaissance, the quantum revolution, and what's going to happen slowly but surely, or quickly but surely in a lot of places, is that you're going to move from this classical world to a fully quantum one where our quantum sensors are able to capture information and we're able to transmit that information using our quantum networks in an entangled state securely, and we're able to then process that information on our quantum computers. And so quantum will become an ever bigger feature of everyone's life. It is happening right now in the background in every single vertical of applied science.
I always like to jokingly say that the reason why quantum computing isn't in the popular zeitgeist to the same extent that say ChatGPT is, is because you can't use our quantum computers — or at least we don't focus on using our quantum computers to cheat on your homework, right? So we don't focus on cheating your homework and we don't focus on banner ads, right? And the reality is classical AI is fantastic at monetizing all of us as a person, as a product. And that's not where we're focused on at IonQ. We're focused on revolutionizing every area of applied science from pharmaceutical to defense to logistics to ultimately material science, sustainability. You know, we are very much a nerdy company. I mean goodness, we have 1,100 people and you know, half of them have advanced degrees, and half of them have advanced degrees in, you know, the physics, math and related material science, engineering, if you will, that we need to make these products.
So I want to double click on a couple of words that you said. You said entanglement. What the heck is entanglement?
Yeah. So here's what I'll say on entanglement. What makes building quantum stuff hard is this concept of entanglement, which allows incredible power to happen if you can maintain it. Entanglement is this superposition concept that some of you will have read about in high school physics classes or undergraduate physics classes if you are taking them, or forced to take them, depending on what your perspective is. And that entanglement allows a couple of things, right? So Richard Feynman pointed out 50 years ago that it would allow incredible computational power if we could perform a bunch of calculations in parallel as opposed to in series. And that's the basis of quantum computing: we can do a bunch of stuff at the same time with every one of our qubits as opposed to doing it in series. The other thing entanglement does is it allows you to transmit information knowing whether or not somebody is interfering with that transmission of information. And so it allows perfect security.
And we've known this in theory for 50 years, but IonQ's been doing this for the better part of a decade at this point from a quantum networking and quantum security perspective. And so we offer the only cybersecurity networks and solutions in the world where it's not just practically difficult to crack and pretty secure, but it's actually completely theoretically secure.
The laws of quantum mechanics tell you that if you play around with information transmitting on a transmission on a quantum network, we absolutely can tell, absolutely now, and we'll be able to tell even in 50 years. And so the future of cybersecurity also runs through quantum key distribution and quantum networks and IonQ's infrastructure.
So you mentioned qubits. What the heck is a qubit?
Yeah. So it's the unit of computation. A qubit is the unit of computation for a quantum computer. We had bits, of course, for classical computers. You know, qubit — great, great piece of marketing and branding that I think Richard Feynman also came up with. It's been known for, you know, 30, 40, 50 years. But it's that entangled perfect physical state which for us we do with ions, which we use lasers to manipulate and perform calculations on.
