Jack Hidary is the CEO of SandboxAQ, taking time out of his busy schedule here in San Francisco to sit down with us, coinciding with RSAC. Jack, great to have you, my man.
You just raised a new round with some top strategic investors. Congratulations on that. First and foremost, talk to me about what that tells you about where the current space of artificial intelligence is.
Well, JD, it's great to see this level, this quality of investor attracted to our company and to the space in general. We raised $450 million in this round. This round included re-ups from investors such as T. Rowe Price and Eric Schmidt and Jim Breyer and Thomas Tull, and so many other wonderful investors from the first round that we did, but also added to it Google and Nvidia as investors as well. And it's great to have those folks as validation, but also as great partners in our company.
Yeah, that's pretty cool to have some heavy hitter names like that that you can roll off there. In terms of the success for you and your company,
But it's also the practical things we can do day to day to bring AI to the next level that builds on the first round we did. And so combined now, we raised $950 million, about a billion dollars now to scale this new wave of AI. And this new wave of AI, JD, is really about taking AI into the real world and high-impact world. And so that means that, for example, new pharmaceuticals, new therapeutics, right? We want to have new medicines for cancer, for Alzheimer's, for dementia, things that have stymied the biopharma industry for 40, 50 years. We can now start to attack with this new kind of AI. That AI, JD, is not large language models, not models trained on social media and cat pictures, as much fun as those are. But this is new AI trained on the biology, the physics, the chemistry, the understanding of the engineering of the world around us, these large quantitative models, LQMs instead of LLMs, that's what's starting to have big impact. And it's great to see both the financial investors back us, but also the strategics as well.
I'm glad you mentioned the difference, and let me drill down on that a little bit more because, Jack, as you know as well as anyone, artificial intelligence, it's on the tip of everyone's tongues, especially here at this conference in San Francisco. So what should the average viewer who's watching this interview know about the key differences between traditional large language models, the chatbots we're all familiar with, engaging with, and what you at SandboxAQ, what you're really pioneering and leading the way for, for LQMs?
Yeah. We're the global pacesetter in these LQMs, JD, because the market is so large and the impact so big that we can have, in fact, 80% of the GDP of the world, 80% of the GDP of the United States, of the world, is focused on quantitative relationships. If you want a new drug, new diagnostic, you are going to need an LQM. If you want a new material to build a car in Detroit and you want to lightweight that car so it has more fuel efficiency, it's cheaper to make, then again, you need an LQM, something that is built and understands the engineering of that car. You don't want hallucinations when it comes to the operating room or the automotive factory. When we think about finance itself, New York Stock Exchange, think about all the financial institutions. The heart of finance is numbers, is equations. And so in portfolio management, in risk management, in portfolio optimization, all these areas require quantitative AI models. Not so much language models, but quantitative models. So again, LLMs, great applications across the board. You can summarize documents in the context of public companies we're talking about here at the NYSE, you can monitor for S-1s, new filings of IPOs, 10-Ks, 10-Qs, great work for LLMs. But the beating heart of Wall Street is ultimately financial calculations, is numbers, is equations. And so when we think about a Sharpe ratio of how much reward are we going to get per unit of risk and we want to build a portfolio to that, that requires quantitative AI to make that work. So SandboxAQ, we're the global pacesetters of this area because we want to have this deep impact at scale. That's our motto, that's our mission, JD. Deep impact at scale, meaning that we're going for global penetration, global presence because our customers demand that, right? Our customers are the largest banks in the world, largest pharma companies in the world, automakers and airline makers. These are the companies that we're helping with LQMs.
