After months of rumours and speculation, Google’s parent company Alphabet spun off its computing quantum software company Sandbox last week. Originally started as a passion project by Sergey Brin, the standalone company will now continue to be led by Jack Hidary, who has been Sandbox Group director. Hidary will lead the 55-member team. SandboxAQ emerged as its own entity after a financing round that reportedly closed at nine figures, with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt being named as chairman. 

Other investors in the round included Thomas Tull, Breyer Capital, Eric Schmidt, First Light Capital Group and advisory companies like Guggenheim Investments, T. Rowe Price Associates, TIME Ventures, Section 32, Parkway Venture Capital and others. Sandbox, describes itself as a SaaS company that is making commercial products for telecom, financial services, computer security and the governmental sector. Clients like Vodafone Business, Softbank Mobile and Mount Sinai Health System are already paying the company for computing power. Despite all these details, exact information on what the six-year-old company is doing has always been cloaked in secrecy. And so are the reasons for the spin-off. 

Quantum’s growing market

According to a Gartner report, 20 per cent of global companies will budget for quantum-computing projects by 2023. This percentage was less than 1 per cent in 2018. 

At the beginning of March, California-based Rigetti Computing merged with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company or SPAC. In October last year, IonQ became the first pure-play quantum computing company to go public. Rigetti Computing became the second pure-play quantum computing company to do the same. Another player in the quantum computing market, D-Wave, has also expressed an interest in going public via SPAC. All this could very well indicate that the market size for quantum computing is finally increasing. 

According to Crunchbase data in September last year, more than USD 728 million had already been invested into quantum computing until then, as compared to USD 515 million invested in 2020. Companies like PsiQuantum from Palo Alto raised USD 450 million in its Series D round, rounding off their total valuation to around USD 3 billion.

Moves

Google has its own quantum computing team nestled in Santa Barbara. Sandbox, unlike that team, will work more towards building quantum-tech applications for business-facing clients. After news of the spin-off, Hidary revealed the first area that Sandbox intended to work on would be Post-Quantum Cryptography and cybersecurity. Hidary stated that they believed that in this decade, companies would invest more in quantum-resistant technologies in their digital communications infrastructure instead of developing quantum applications. Sandbox will help companies find and upgrade their cryptography codes. 

Jim Breyer also commented on the opportunities in national security for quantum computing companies. Breyer suggested that even though true quantum computing involves using quantum physics to come up with the correct result, it could be away from us by five years or more. 

Quantum sensing is combining areas of quantum physics along with AI to come up with commercial applications using high-performance computers, minus quantum computers. The quantum simulators that result from this can have real-world applications across healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and aerospace, among others. Sandbox has confirmed that it plans to hire more AI experts, physicists and engineers with the funds it has raised. 

Quantum sensing

AI-enhanced quantum sensors could be vital for the military in case of an environment where GPS was denied. Autonomous vehicles could also require this capability if there is GPS interference or GPS signals are blocked by tall buildings or tunnels. Quantum sensors can make magnetic sensors more sensitive or become even more powerful when the sensor output is fed into AI software. 

Breyer added that quantum computing would ultimately help catch diseases faster and improve security systems, but it could easily be used also to attack systems which is why governments and companies aren’t waiting anymore for quantum computing to arrive. According to him, quantum technologies like quantum sensing were making a huge difference already.

McKinsey predicted that looking at some of the most promising applications for quantum sensing like bioimaging, spectroscopy, navigation, fundamental scientific applications and geographic surveying, it could generate USD 5 billion in revenue by 2030.