Alphabet Spins Off Quantum Company SandboxAQ; New Company Closes ‘Nine-Figure’ Round

Alphabet officially spun off its 6-year-old quantum tech group—SandboxAQ—which emerged as its own company after closing an “nine-figure” financing round and naming former Google CEO Eric Schmidt chairman.

Investors in the round include Breyer Capital, Eric Schmidt, Thomas Tull, First Light Capital Group, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Guggenheim Investments, TIME Ventures, Section 32, Parkway Venture Capital and other funds and investors.

The exact dollar amount and terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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SandboxAQ is looking at the related effects of both AI and quantum—which is where the company gets “AQ”—to develop commercial products for telecom, financial services, health care, security and other computationally intensive sectors. The company already is working with a handful of customers on enterprise software and cybersecurity tools related to quantum computing.

The company’s 55 engineers, scientists and technologists will be led by serial entrepreneur and CEO Jack Hidary.

Quantum computing is a level of compute much faster and at a level superior to classical computers that examines quantum states to perform computation.

While not a reality yet, investors see potential. Venture dollars in the sector hit a record level last year with more than $800 million invested in quantum, according to Crunchbase. That number includes Palo Alto-based PsiQuantum’s $450 million Series D last July at a $3.1 billion valuation.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.