Quantum AI startup SandboxAQ valued at $5.3 billion after $300 million fundraising

SandboxAQ said on Wednesday it has raised more than $300 million in funding, valuing the startup spun off from Alphabet at $5.6 billion, as it aims to fast-track the development of advanced artificial intelligence systems for computation.

The new funding, from investors including New York-based investment firm Fred Alger Management, T. Rowe Price, and Breyer Capital, will be used to accelerate the development of its large quantitative models (LQMs) and other AI applications in industries from healthcare to finance.

This follows a $500 million fundraising last year to build its quantum computing platform to serve business customers.

SandboxAQ says its AI technology differs from the large language models that power ChatGPT in the generative AI wave. Instead of training on a huge number of language tokens, its models train on large numerical data.

“The majority of the economy is actually not based on language. It’s actually based on quantitative relationships,” said Jack Hidary, CEO at SandboxAQ.

The Palo Alto, California-based company plans to invest the capital in building news modules for specific use cases for big enterprise customers, from drug discovery to materials science, Hidary said.

Breyer Capital founder and CEO Jim Breyer, an early backer in SandboxAQ, said the company can train quantitative models on existing hardware like Nvidia GPUs. It could also benefit from future breakthroughs in the quantum chip space.

Google, for example, said earlier this month that its new chip called Willow has overcome a key challenge in quantum computing, prompting its shares to jump.

SandboxAQ was spun off from Alphabet as an independent startup in 2022, with former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt as chairman. The company caters to various sectors such as cybersecurity, encryption and life sciences.