The History of SandboxAQ
While most companies are content to stay in one lane, developing either AI-powered software, platforms and that ubiquitous Silicon Valley term, solutions, Google’s Sandbox AQ has sat comfortably across both lanes since its inception in 2016. Founded the year that the two biggest economies in the Western world began to go pear-shaped, Sandbox’s A was for AI and the Q for quantum – and over the year, the company’s engineers, physicists and computer nerds have stayed relatively quiet over their research and development.
Whether those are in sensing technology, cybersecurity or in creating helpful simulation environments, the brainchild of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has now decided to go it alone. Announced back in March 2022, the company revealed a “nine-figure funding round”, according to the WSJ and Reuters. Some of their funders are hefty players, unsurprisingly, given its kudos, including T. Rowe Price, Guggenheim Partners, TIME Ventures, and In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA.
The company is run by tech and neuroscience wunderkind Jack Hidary, who is also, along with his brother, a serial entrepreneur, in the CEO seat.
SandboxAQ’s achievements and plans
Boasting a 55-strong team of physicists, engineers, AI experts and more, the team’s plan, according to CIO, “development of software-as-a-service products for the enterprise, tackling problems such as cybersecurity, navigation, and drug discovery.”
The company already boasts customers such as Vodafone Business, Softbank Mobile, WIX, Mt. Sinai Health System and the US government.
But, as Hidary recently told CIO.com, the company might be in a great position to advise on any number of AI- and quantum-related areas, what it primarily offers is scanning licence-as-a-service where companies can scan for post-quantum vulnerabilities. In addition, SandboxAQ also offers advisory services on migration, and how to get ready for it. While it’s unclear what protection the company actually offers against either current or post-quantum threats, it seems, from their website, that it’s in development?
Being blunt, it’s all a little hazy and it’s unclear what the exact service provided will be, but for now, it does not seem to be a working cybersecurity tool.
Funding and more funding? Or the same funding?
Google’s new operating-on-its-own-well-mostly wunderkind has been in the news a lot recently, mainly because, well, Google. But the funding has certainly piqued plenty of interest amongst both laypeople and Silicon Valley stalwarts.
For example, a few articles have reported that the company recently raised $500 million in its latest funding round, with even Reuters writing about it.
However, since SandboxAQ hasn’t shared its financials, it’s a little unclear as to whether it’s accurate to say that this was recently raised, or is the total amount raised over the three rounds of funding (two seed and one early stage) in total. Poking around the world wide web, it would seem the latter is far more likely.
This is particularly likely, as Benzinga reports, “A spokesperson for Sandbox told Benzinga that this was not a new funding round but a disclosure of the ‘significant, nine-figure’ funding round it announced when the company emerged from Alphabet in March 2022.”
So it would seem that Reuters and others may have slightly misreported on the funding figures and rounds – what we can ascertain fully is that $500 million has been raised via three rounds. Anything more than that would be speculation at best. As ever, with investment, particularly into speculative tech, it’s always best to do your own research and speak to industry experts, rather than take a company’s comments as word – we’ve all seen how that can end with the likes of Enron, Goldman Sachs, et al.
That said, however, the company is making great strides and, according to investment trade titles, has also won a small contract from the US Air Force.
What is clear is what SandboxAQ CEO Jack Hidary has to say about the incoming quantum threat, and that’s that it’s not an ‘if’ but a ‘when’, and that public and private organisations need to be ramping up for the switchover to post-quantum encryption.
Thankfully, while SandboxAQ remains more on the speculative side, there are firms in operation who already have some fairly elegant, easily deployable solutions, such as Arqit and Quantum Base (both UK-headquartered but internationally operating). Arqit is on the platform-as-a-service side of things, offering symmetric encryption via satellite key delivery, working with blockchain and cryptocurrency. Quantum Base is focused on the IoT and uses atomic-scale fingerprint technology.
Exciting times for those in the post-quantum technology game!