SandboxAQ, a company that develops artificial intelligence and quantum sensing technology, announced today that it has raised more than $300 million in new funding at a valuation of more than $5.6 billion to accelerate the development of specialized AI models.

Investors participating in the round included former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Salesforce Inc. founder and CEO Marc Benioff, Fred Alger Management, LLC, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Mumtalakat, Parkway Venture Capital, Breyer Capital, Rizvi Traverse, S32, US Innovative Technology Fund and Ava Investments, among others.

Spun out of Alphabet Inc. in 2022, SandboxAQ’s name refers to “A” for AI and “Q” for quantum. The company intends to build and develop new AI models known as large quantitative models and support AI applications in science, chemistry, drug discovery, navigation, cybersecurity and medical devices.

LQMs differ from large language models in that they are trained on data generated by SandboxAQ using physics-based methodology. By contrast, LLMs, such as OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT, use language and text data as their basis for understanding logic and reasoning.

“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,” said SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary.

In drug discovery, SandboxAQ trains its LQMs on computational orthogonal models, computational chemistry methods, predictive modeling and proprietary knowledge graphs to provide unique views of molecules. According to the company, this provides the models a way to accurately represent complex biological systems.

For materials science and chemistry, the company produces its own training data using physics-based computer modeling to create high-quality data, which is extremely scarce. That allows materials engineers to accelerate the time to the discovery of novel materials by using LQMs trained and fine-tuned on this physical data.

The objective of the company is not to do away with LLMs for these discoveries, Hidary explained, but to supplement them with the complex solving power of LQMs, which can reveal insights into these highly intricate systems.

Among the company’s achievements, SandboxAQ announced a breakthrough navigational platform called AQNav, which combines quantum sensors and AI algorithms with a map of Earth’s magnetic field. It provides an unjammable, all-weather navigation solution that will work even when GPS is unavailable.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer