A lot of people have been asking us what Sandbox AQ are building, having been the subject of speculation since the start of 2022. With Jack Hidary in the CEO spot and Eric Schmidt as Chairman, its easy to understand why. Whilst we expect to find out more over the coming months, we decided to have a deeper look based on public sources.
The website currently provides the following description:
SandboxAQ is an enterprise SaaS company combining AI + Quantum tech to solve hard problems impacting society. Our solutions include post-RSA cybersecurity modules that migrate enterprises to higher levels of security. These Sandbox AQ modules enable post-quantum cryptography (PQC) in line with the new standards that are now emerging in this field.
Dig a bit deeper and you get to the following potential end markets. At a very high level, the business appears to be focused on finding applications for big addressable markets using a mixture of AI and Quantum Technology. Within Quantum Technology, there appears to be ambitions to cover sensing and security – not just computing.
So who is the company actually hiring? A quick review of LinkedIn and their website gives us some clues. We analyzed the 28 hires by function, see below. We acknowledge this is a very imperfect way of looking at the business; the it misses the current employees (<10 according to LinkedIn) and is based on a quick review of job descriptions. Nonetheless, in short, there appears to be a heavy skew towards quantum security roles.
The business has not been specific about how much funding it raised back in March 2022 though it has guided to “nine figures”. At the very least this is $100 million which will give it substantial firepower to build out a world-class team in the quantum technology ecosystem…watch this space!
For more market insights, check out our latest quantum computing news here.
