Just nine months ago, Morgan Prize-winning prodigy Carina Hong was still on an academic track, pursuing a joint law degree and math PhD at Stanford. Now, as the founder of startup Axiom Math, she runs one of the most promising challengers in a new, fast-paced category: AI for math.
Recently valued at $1.6 billion, Axiom has already solved some of math’s most challenging problems, and Hong hopes it can help researchers advance the field. Her bigger ambition? To power real-time math-based verification of AI-generated code, to do away with vibe-coded slop.
On this episode of The Upstarts Podcast, Hong shares her founder journey from immigrant at MIT to Oxford, and ultimately dropping out of Stanford; how she’s learning as a first-time founder to help Axiom compete in a red-hot new category; and her Upstart Moment when Axiom took the world’s hardest college-level math test.
Chapters
00:48 Intro to Carina Hong
2:02 What Axiom Math does
5:51 ‘Math is AGI’
8:48 Not replacing mathematicians
13:28 Winning the Morgan Prize
17:17 Origins of Axiom
22:22 The new math AI race
25:51 Carina’s Upstart Moment
31:47 Axiom’s business prospects
36:39 Why the future is verified coding
For more, visit https://www.upstartsmedia.com/
Season 1 of the Upstarts Podcast is presented by Mercury
Produced & edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod
