Company: SandboxAQ
Founder: Jack Hidary
Website: https://www.sandboxaq.com
About SandboxAQ
SandboxAQ began at Alphabet in 2016 and became an independent company in 2022. Today, SandboxAQ is driving AI innovation across aerospace, biopharma, chemicals, cybersecurity, defence, energy, finance, healthcare, materials science and semiconductors.
The company has raised more than $1 billion from leading investors and strategic partners including funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Google, Alger, IQT, US Innovative Technology Fund, S32, Paladin Capital, BNP Paribas, Eric Schmidt, Breyer Capital, Ray Dalio, Marc Benioff, Thomas Tull, and others.
A key challenge has been translating advanced AI, physics, and quantitative methods into practical solutions that deliver measurable results. SandboxAQ has overcome this by building multidisciplinary technology that enables commercial, scientific and government organisations to tackle previously intractable problems. SandboxAQ’s Large Quantitative Models (LQMs), trained on physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics – not language found online, and Quantitative AI solutions solve complex scientific and commercial challenges that Large Language Models (LLMs) and other AI approaches cannot.
For example, after traditional methods had failed to yield meaningful results in Alzheimer’s research, the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases partnered with SandboxAQ to improve its discovery efforts. SandboxAQ significantly expanded UCSF’s molecular library from 250,000 to 5.6 million molecules (22x increase) and virtually screened them in one month – versus a year to screen 250,000 (>10x faster).
SandboxAQ’s AI simulation and optimisation techniques reduced the number of molecules UCSF sent to the lab for experimentation from 250,000 to 7,000 (36x cost savings), and increased hit-rates 30x, from 0.01% to 0.34%. SandboxAQ is also accelerating innovation in chemicals and advanced materials. Nearly 80% of manufactured goods and 90% of commercial chemicals require catalysts, yet discovering new and better catalysts can take years of costly, risky lab experimentation.
DIC Corp. was searching for more efficient, non-toxic, and cost-effective catalysts for industrial applications. Partnering with SandboxAQ, DIC uncovered superior nickel-based catalysts previously undetectable using conventional methods and reduced computation time from six months to five hours. Similarly, the US Army tasked SandboxAQ with identifying stronger, lighter armor alloys for its armored vehicles.
After evaluating more than 7,000 compositions, SandboxAQ identified five top performing alloys that delivered a 15% weight reduction while maintaining high strength and elongation and minimised reliance on conflict minerals including tungsten, cobalt and nickel. These successes led the Department of Commerce to award SandboxAQ $500 million to stimulate the US semiconductor industry by developing novel molecules and formulations and minimising foreign control of essential materials, chemistries and processes used in semiconductor manufacturing.
LQMs and quantum sensors are also being used to develop alternative navigation systems for commercial and defence aviation use when GPS signals are jammed or spoofed, and a next-generation cardiac device that measures the heart’s magnetic field for faster, more accurate diagnosis of the world’s #1 cause of death. By turning quantitative AI into deployable solutions, SandboxAQ is strengthening US leadership in AI, scientific discovery, national security, healthcare and advanced manufacturing while demonstrating how the next generation of AI – LQMs – can deliver real-world impact.
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