Drug discovery is one of the most expensive pursuits in modern industry. Finding a single viable molecule can take a decade and cost billions, and most candidates still fall short. A generation of AI startups has promised to fix that—most have made the problem less painful for researchers, who are already technically sophisticated enough to use the tools.
But SandboxAQ believes that the bottleneck is not the models. It’s the interface.
The company partnered with Anthropic to integrate its scientific AI models directly into Claude — putting powerful drug discovery and materials science tools behind a conversational interface that requires no specialized computing infrastructure to use.
Founded about five years ago as a spinout of Alphabet, SandboxAQ counts Eric Schmidt, a former Google CEO, as its president. The company, which has increased more than $950 million from investorshas established a number of different business lines including a cyber security business.
However, one of the most unique things SandboxAQ does is produce large quantitative models, or LQMs. These proprietary models are “physics-based,” meaning they are based on the rules of the physical world rather than patterns in the text. They can perform quantum chemistry calculations and simulate both molecular dynamics and microkinetics, the study of how chemical reactions unfold at the molecular level. This matters because it tells researchers how candidate molecules are likely to behave before anyone sets foot in a lab.
“Trained on real-world lab data and scientific equations, LQMs are AI models designed for the quantitative economy, a $50+ trillion field that spans biopharma, financial services, energy and advanced materials,” the company said in a news release that strongly suggests Sandbox AQ isn’t building another chatbot or utility to transform the economy.
Chai Discovery and Isomorphic Labs — both well-funded bets on better models — have focused on the science. SandboxAQ focuses on who can actually use it.
“For the first time, we have borders [quantitative] model on an LLM frontier that one can access in natural language,” Nadia Harhen, general manager of artificial intelligence simulation at SandboxAQ, told TechCrunch. Previously, users of SandboxAQ’s LQMs would have to provide their own digital infrastructure to run the models.
SandboxAQ customers tend to be computer scientists, research scientists, or experimenters. Generally, these people work in large pharmaceutical or industrial companies and are looking for new materials that can be turned into marketable products.
“Our customers come to us because they’ve tried all the other software out there, and the complexity of their problem is such that it didn’t work or yield positive results for them when that translation was done in the real world,” Harhen said.
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