AI for Math startup building formal proof systems and code verification tools.
“In December 2025, Axium Prover achieved a perfect score on the Putnam. That's the 6th perfect score in 98 years — the first by an AI.”
SourceAI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.
“Ken has the personality of a high school basketball coach — he keeps everyone enthusiastic and optimistic. He also intercepted an offer from OpenAI to join us.”
Source→“Co-founder of Axium. ~8-9 year Meta/FAIR veteran, Director of Facebook AI Research.”
Source→“Menlo is Anthropic's largest institutional investor, and we are their second-largest AI investment after Anthropic.”
Source→“Amazon has one of the world's best automated reasoning teams. Without AI, they spent three to five years writing 260,000 lines of theorem-proving code to verify the memory isolation component of their hypervisor.”
Source→“Howard Morgan was just more optimistic about our business model than I was. He was telling me what my business model was... He's a mathematician, still teaches at NYU sometimes.”
Source→“François and Guillaume Lample wrote the paper showing transformers could beat Mathematica on integration. Since then, François has published paper after paper on AI solving specialized math problems.”
Source→“Terence Tao has many podcasts and writings about formal proofs. My friend Kenny was one of the 5–7 students who built the foundations of Mathlib from scratch.”
Source→“Evan looked at one problem, drew a picture, and we all said 'oh, you've solved it.' The AI found no such elegant solution — it produced thousands of lines of Lean through brute-force case analysis.”
Source→“We're not aiming for AGI. We're aiming for ASI — Specialized Superintelligence. We're going straight for 'prove the Riemann Hypothesis' on the edge of the plate.”
Source→“I respect my friends doing AI for Science. But if you want fast iteration with computation and logic, math and code are the better sandbox.”
Source→“Axium built 12-13 custom tools to make Lean (the formal language) run properly, including a proof verifier that is 100x faster than the community standard.”
Source→“Partner Matt Cranin (electrical engineering PhD, physics undergrad) was described as deeply technical and founder-oriented. Menlo proactively preempted the A-round.”
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