By Priyanka G and Krystal Hu

Dec 18 (Reuters) - SandboxAQ said on Wednesday it has

raised more than $300 million in funding, valuing the startup

spun off from Alphabet at $5.6 billion, as it aims to

fast-track the development of advanced artificial intelligence

systems for computation.

The new funding, from investors including New York-based

investment firm Fred Alger Management, T. Rowe Price, and Breyer

Capital, will be used to accelerate the development of its large

quantitative models (LQMs) and other AI applications in

industries from healthcare to finance.

This follows a $500 million fundraising last year to build

its quantum computing platform to serve business customers.

SandboxAQ says its AI technology differs from the large

language models that power ChatGPT in the generative AI wave.

Instead of training on a huge number of language tokens, its

models train on large numerical data.

"The majority of the economy is actually not based on

language. It's actually based on quantitative relationships,"

said Jack Hidary, CEO at SandboxAQ.

The Palo Alto, California-based company plans to invest the

capital in building news modules for specific use cases for big

enterprise customers, from drug discovery to materials science,

Hidary said.

Breyer Capital founder and CEO Jim Breyer, an early backer

in SandboxAQ, said the company can train quantitative models on

existing hardware like Nvidia GPUs. It could also benefit from

future breakthroughs in the quantum chip space.

Google, for example, said earlier this month that its new

chip called Willow has overcome a key challenge in quantum

computing, prompting its shares to jump.

SandboxAQ was spun off from Alphabet as an independent

startup in 2022, with former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt

as chairman. The company caters to various sectors such as

cybersecurity, encryption and life sciences.