5 things to know about Carina Hong, 24-year-old Stanford dropout luring Big Tech talent to her math startup

The China-born mathematician has recently emerged as one of the most talked-about young figures in artificial intelligence after Axiom secured US$64 million in seed funding in September and assembled a team that includes prominent researchers from major tech companies such as Meta and Google DeepMind, along with a world-renowned mathematician.

Here are five things to know about the talented Stanford dropout.

Carina Hong. Photo courtesy of American Mathematical Society

First generation MIT graduate

Hong grew up in Guangzhou and was one of only two people in her family to attend college, according to her story for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s First Gen and/or Low Income Program, which supports students from low-income backgrounds or whose parents did not complete a four-year degree.

Despite her parents not having a higher education, Hong always envisioned herself going to college.

"I thought there’s such a big, exciting world out there, and I wanted to see how to get there," she said in a March article for MIT’s Alumni Life column.

She had eyed the prestigious school early and found her path with mathematics.

"At 14 or 15, I was writing ‘MIT’ on the margins of scratch paper to motivate myself to keep going," she recounted, adding that her time at the school was lonely at first as most peers in the math department were already familiar with one another through U.S. Olympiads.

"I didn’t know any other person going to MIT from my life before."

Dazzling academic track record

At MIT, Hong completed 20 advanced mathematics courses and wrote nine research papers. She won the 2022 Alice T. Schafer Prize, which is awarded to only one woman undergraduate math major in the U.S. each year, and the 2023 Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student.

Hong finished her MIT degrees in mathematics and physics in just three years and later received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where she earned a master’s degree in computational neuroscience.

Before launching her startup, she was also studying for a joint law degree and mathematics PhD at Stanford.

The idea for Axiom

While Hong’s passion for math was evident in her achievements and studies, she has also been interested in AI.

When DeepSeek surged to global prominence earlier this year, Hong was quoted by Chinese media outlet 36Kr as commenting: "A small, focused, and maverick team. An excellent group of idealistic partners. They have strong execution ability and are hands-on. Most importantly, they have a belief that combines ideals and missions.

"This is the story of DeepSeek, and it's also the story I want to write myself."

Hong said in the MIT alumni article that she was eager to take on what she called the "exciting technical bottlenecks" involving the combination of mathematics and deep learning.

"What is the future of AI and mathematician interaction? And how will applied scientists interact with an AI mathematician? These are puzzles I hope to work on next."

Hong reportedly started Axiom shortly after a conversation on AI with Shubho Sengupta, who previously led Meta’s FAIR teams behind projects such as OpenGo and CrypTen.

She and Sengupta met by chance at a coffee shop, struck up a friendship, and went on to spend hours discussing where their fields overlapped and the potential for an AI that could not only solve the world’s hardest math problems but also discover new ones, according to Forbes.

Up for the challenge

According to Hong, a piece of advice that crossed her mind when she was weighing the decision to leave Stanford was one shared by AMD chief executive Lisa Su: run toward the hardest problems. And she has been doing just that with Axiom.

"Research math is really hard," Hong told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview. "AI for math is harder."

"Olympiad math is a constant dopamine hit, but research math is banging your head against the wall. It’s pain and suffering. I like that part."

Hong faces formidable rivals even with her startup’s momentum. AI heavyweights such as OpenAI and Google DeepMind recently reached gold medal-level scores at the International Math Olympiad, widely regarded as one of the most elite math competitions, after their models solved five of six exceptionally difficult problems.

Hong, however, is not deterred, arguing that such results can be gamed and do not truly reflect research-level mathematics.

Axiom’s unique team

B Capital, the global investment firm that led Axiom’s seed funding round, remarked that Hong has assembled a remarkably talent-dense founding team at exceptional speed.

That team is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the moment and turn advanced mathematical reasoning into reality, it said.

With Sengupta as its chief technology officer, other notable names include Francois Charton, who solved a 100-year-old math problem last year and previously researched large language models for mathematics and theoretical physics at Meta, and Hugh Leather, a former Meta AI research scientist and an early adopter of deep learning for code generation.

Axiom quickly drew notice in Silicon Valley for its hiring spree and recently managed to recruit Ken Ono, Hong’s former professor and a globally recognized mathematician.

Hong said her firm’s focus on advanced math has been central to attracting senior talent from major technology firms, many of whom deem the field as foundational to the pursuit of superintelligence.

Some of the top researchers and mathematicians she recruited to Axiom viewed the pursuit of mathematical superintelligence as their legacy, she noted.

"When the problem is hard enough, talent density gets very high, and that makes you a magnet for other great thinkers," she told Business Insider.