A 24-year-old Stanford Ph.D. dropout shares how she lured Meta's top AI researchers and raised $64 million for her math startup
A 24-year-old Stanford dropout has wooed top Meta AI researchers to her nascent startup, which is building an AI mathematician.Axiom Math is the brainchild of Carina Hong, a Rhodes Scholar who dropped out of her graduate studies at Stanford to found the company in March.Axiom, which recently said it solved two Erdos math problems that eluded mathematicians for decades, announced a $64 million seed round in September.The company has 17 employees, many of whom hail from Meta's Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab, as well as Meta's GenAI team and Google Brain, which merged into DeepMind in 2023.Axiom is tackling advanced math, which AI researchers and leaders consider essential to achieving superintelligence. Hong says this mission helped her draw top talent from Big Tech companies.BI's Young Geniuses series spotlights the next generation of founders, innovators, and thinkers who are trying to reshape industries and solve global challenges. See more stories from the series here, or reach out to editor Jess Orwig to share your story."One thing I heard from some of the top researchers and mathematicians I've recruited to Axiom is that solving for mathematical superintelligence will be their legacy," Hong told Business Insider. "When the problem is hard enough, talent density gets very high, and that makes you a magnet for other great thinkers."Hong told Business Insider that she focused some of her early recruiting efforts on FAIR because "they consistently deliver amazing research work."FAIR is one of the oldest pillars of Meta's rapidly evolving AI organization, focused on long-term research. Meta conducted layoffs on that team in October and later lost its chief scientist, Yann LeCun, who announced he was leaving Meta in November to start his own AI startup.Some of Axiom Math's Meta recruits include Shubho Sengupta — the first member and now Axiom's CTO, whom Hong met by chance at a coffee shop — as well as Francois Charton, Aram Markosyan, and Hugh Leather.Hong said that while Meta offered significant retention packages industry-wide when she was building her team, she wasn't privy to any specific competing offers.In a competitive talent market, Axiom's potential long-term upside played a role in attracting researchers, Hong said. What's more, she said they have been exhilarated by the mission since day one, when the office was furnished by a plastic folding table and a friend's spare couch.Hong isn't only recruiting from Big Tech. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that she had wooed her former professor, the renowned mathematician Ken Ono.Hong says she sees age and experience as "sort of manmade concepts," and has been accustomed to working with more senior researchers during her time in academia. She has also sought to imbue Axiom with a "non-hierarchical" culture.The company's mission goes beyond math—another draw for recruits. Hong said Axiom's commercial applications could include "any domain where you need provably correct reasoning," such as hardware and software verification, quantitative finance, and cryptography.
