Tom Harty is a co-founder and the chief technology officer of Oxford Ionics. He founded the company in 2019 with Chris Ballance. Both are physicists who did their PhDs at the University of Oxford and met there more than a decade before the company began.
Harty later worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Oxford physics group that studies ion-trap quantum computing. Oxford Ionics started as a spinout from the University of Oxford.
The company's key idea was to put the control electronics for trapped ions into conventional silicon chips. Earlier trapped-ion systems were too unwieldy to scale. Oxford Ionics aimed for a trapped-ion computer that could.
On 9 June 2025 IonQ announced it would acquire Oxford Ionics for $1.075bn, with $1.065bn paid in stock and $10m in cash. The deal completed in September 2025. Harty was expected to continue working on the technology at IonQ.