SandboxAQ have announced a round of more than $300 million from Fred Alger Management, LLC, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Mumtalakat, Parkway Venture Capital, Breyer Capital, Rizvi Traverse, S32, US Innovative Technology Fund, Ava Investments, Eric Schmidt, Marc Benioff, David Siegel, Yann LeCun, IQT, and other prominent investors. The funding round valued the company at $5.3 billion on a pre-money basis.
The company raised new funding to accelerate the development of its Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) and other AI applications in drug discovery, materials science, chemistry, cybersecurity, navigation, and medical devices.
“Large Quantitative Models are the next wave of AI as they provide a powerful ability to solve science and business problems for large industries including aerospace, biopharma, chemicals, defense, energy, finance, and more. The capital raise we are announcing today gives us additional resources to drive deep impact at scale,” said Jack D. Hidary, CEO of SandboxAQ. “LLMs and LQMs are complementary platforms that are both needed in the world of B2B applications. We are pleased to see the commitment of so many long-term investors in SandboxAQ.”
Eric Schmidt, Chairman of SandboxAQ (and former CEO of Google), said: “Leading global enterprises are realizing that they must look beyond the capabilities and limitations of LLMs and embrace LQMs in order to maximize the ROI from their AI investments. Jack Hidary and his team at SandboxAQ have shown the ability to create significant customer value across key industries such as biopharma, chemicals, and financial services. Jack is a world-class, high-integrity CEO leading a deeply technical team. With this round, SandboxAQ can move even faster to its goals and impact.”
“We see significant growth potential and opportunity for LQMs across a broad range of industries, which is why investing in SandboxAQ is an investment in AI’s future,” said Jim Breyer, Breyer Capital. “Through SandboxAQ, Breyer Capital has a front-row seat to a generation-defining company with some of the most inspiring uses of AI technology. Jack is both a visionary and a high-performance CEO, uniting science and AI in bold and meaningful ways to address the world’s most pressing challenges.”
“I am investing in SandboxAQ because of their industry-leading approach to quantitative AI,” said Yann LeCun, a leading AI scientist and one of three Turing Award winners for deep learning. “While LLMs are very helpful tools for consumers, it is quantitative AI that will define work in large sectors of the economy including biopharma, chemicals and financial services. I am impressed by the technical depth of Jack and his team and am excited to support their work. SandboxAQ has emerged as a leader in novel applications of AI that solve the most pressing challenges in the world and their technical success is impressive.”
SandboxAQ is completing 2024 with achievements that underscore its leadership in AI-driven innovation and scientific research. SandboxAQ’s Large Quantitative Models (LQMs) and other technologies have set a new standard in AI, tackling computationally complex challenges in healthcare, energy, chemicals, aerospace, defense, and other industries.
Earlier this month, SandboxAQ celebrated an array of milestones for 2024, including the publication of 18 peer-reviewed papers.
