by Ken Kingery — March 12, 2021 . DURHAM – Born from a 15-year-long collaboration between Duke University faculty members in engineering and physics, IonQ will become the first publicly traded company focused solely on quantum computing. The company on March 8 announced it had entered into a merger agreement with dMY Technology Group, Inc. III (NYSE: DMYI.U), a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company (“dMY III”). Upon closing of the transaction, IonQ shares will trade on the NYSE under the symbol “IONQ.” Pro forma implied market capitalization of the combined company is approximately $2 billion. The company, founded on a promising approach to quantum computing that uses trapped ions to store and manipulate data, has a licensing agreement to translate Duke innovations into IonQ technology. Its founders believe this translation will only accelerate with the newly established Duke Quantum Center—a 20,000-square-foot space in downtown Durham, North Carolina that will offer programmable, reconfigurable quantum computing capability to engineers, physicists, chemists, mathematicians or anyone who comes forward with a complex optimization problem they’d like to try on a powerful quantum computing system.