Quantum, AI Systems Company Gains $500M in New Funds

(Gerd Altmann, Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/illustrations/physics-quantum-physics-particles-3871218/)

15 Feb. 2023. A developer of systems with quantum computing and artificial intelligence as a service, initially for security applications, is raising $500 million in new venture funds. Sandbox AQ — A is for artificial intelligence and Q for quantum — was founded as part of Alphabet Inc. in 2016 and spun-off as a separate enterprise last year to offer enterprise computing services that combine the two technologies.

Sandbox AQ, in Palo Alto, California, is marketing its AI/quantum security infrastructure to U.S. government agencies and larger companies and institutions. Quantum computing processes information based on probabilities, describing its data components as infinite quantum bits or qubits, with values from 0 to 1. The technology is derived from quantum mechanics, which in physics is applied to describe energy and matter at the atomic and sub-atomic levels. Quantum behavior of energy and matter can vary substantially from deterministic forms of physics, and enable the existence and interactions of energy and matter in multiple simultaneous states.

In contrast, today’s digital technologies process data largely in terms of 0s or 1s, with quantum processes and their multiple simultaneous operations likely to break many of today’s systems. Yet quantum computing also presents both opportunities and threats to security, with the prospect of quantum-based encryption protocols offering a much more secure environment, while the sophisticated analytical abilities of quantum computing presenting a threat to break current encryption methods. In July 2022, National Institute of Standards and Technology released its latest report on standards for post-quantum cryptography to protect against quantum-computing security attacks.

Sandbox AQ says its combination of machine-learning algorithms and quantum computing can provide higher orders of security for corporate systems. The company says its offerings include monitoring and analysis of IT infrastructures, plus sophisticated cryptography policies, and live enforcement of those policies and remediation in response to security threats.

Small business awards from USAF

Reuters news service reported last night on Sandbox AQ raising $500 million in venture funds, led by technology investor Breyer Capital in Austin, Texas. Other investors in the company include T. Rowe Price, Salesforce.com, and TIME Ventures. The company expects security to continue to be its main focus, while it develops other AI/quantum applications.

“Right now you have a lot of banks and pharma companies and governments still using these old protocols,” Jack Hidary, CEO of Sandbox AQ tells Reuters, referring to earlier security routines. “The average bank takes five to seven years to migrate over. … Now, hopefully they’ll do their important customer private information first.”

In Nov. 2022, Sandbox AQ received a Small Business Innovation Research or SBIR award from the U.S. Air Force for a feasibility study of the company’s software to assess the state of USAF systems security and implement a full-scale framework for protecting their systems from quantum-based security attacks.

And in Jan. 2023, the Air Force awarded another SBIR contract to Sandbox AQ for research on quantum computing for navigation systems to complement current complement the Global Positioning System or GPS technology, where GPS might be degraded or denied. The work is expected to include live demonstrations on USAF aircraft.

Sandbox AQ says its AI/Quantum technology can provide advanced sensing capabilities for biomedical monitoring in portable medical devices, continuous diagnostics, materials safety, and IT hardware security. Those same advanced sensing technologies, says the company, can be used in geophysical systems in autonomous vehicles, as well as aerospace, underwater, and underground applications, such as global navigation.

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Hat tip: Crunchbase News

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