How Do You Invest in a Company That Doesn't Have Earnings Yet?

Some of the companies building tomorrow’s technologies don’t fit neatly into the way investors have traditionally valued businesses. Jacksonville founder Alphaeus Hanson built Ambiorix to study them differently.

There is a familiar logic behind deciding what a company might be worth. Look at the business it is doing, the money coming in, its earnings and cash flow, then use that information to help make a judgment about what could come next.

But what happens when some of those numbers aren’t there yet?

That’s a problem Alphaeus Hanson has spent years thinking about, particularly among smaller companies working on frontier technologies. Some may be developing technologies with enormous potential while still being years away from meaningful revenue or earnings. They can be too small for extensive bank research coverage, and the investment firms looking at them may not have someone in-house who spends their days understanding that particular corner of the market.

The companies are public. The opportunity to invest is there. Understanding what you’re looking at is the harder part.

In a recent conversation with Randall Thomas of PB&Jax for the jax-preneur series, Hanson explained that conversations with people already making investment decisions kept confirming what he had encountered himself.

“A lot of the people I was speaking to in the market, a lot of professional finance professionals, agreed in the sense that it was very difficult to price and value these stocks.”

Instead of trying to make these companies fit the same framework used for more established businesses, Hanson started looking somewhere else for answers.

That question became Ambiorix.

When the Usual Numbers Don’t Tell the Whole Story

Ambiorix builds quantitative investment strategies focused on small- and mid-cap frontier-technology companies, then licenses those strategies to asset managers, hedge funds and family offices.

The distinction Hanson makes is important. He isn’t trying to invent another formula for what a company without earnings should be worth. His system studies how the stocks behave.

“Ambiorix basically finds patterns in the behavior of these stocks and builds strategies around them.”

The system creates, tests and validates strategies around those patterns. For an investment manager who wants exposure to frontier technology but doesn’t have the internal expertise to evaluate hundreds of smaller companies, Ambiorix is designed to provide another way to approach the decision.

Hanson had heard from asset managers who simply avoided this part of the market. Others relied on outside research. Neither solved the question that kept pulling him back.

Hanson puts the gap this way:

“…some of the most important technology companies of the next decade may also be the ones institutions are least equipped to understand.”

That’s the space where he’s trying to build.

Six Years at the Same Intersection

Ambiorix may be a young company, but the two worlds behind it aren’t new to Hanson.

He started his career in cybersecurity, consulting at Krebs Stamos Group, where his work included companies such as Salesforce, Iridium and Silver Lake. He later conducted research at the Atlantic Council around cybersecurity and capital markets before moving into deep-tech venture capital investing. Alongside that work was another interest: public markets.

Hanson has invested in public equities personally for more than six years. He studied economics at the University of Delaware, earned a CFA private markets certificate and, at one point, even built a system to mine Ethereum.

Technology and markets kept crossing paths.

When Randall asked how long he had been working toward Ambiorix, Hanson had to make a distinction. The company and its current methodology are recent. The road to them isn’t.

“I’ve been working towards this in some way, shape, or form for the past six years.”

In December 2025, he began developing the methodology that would become the foundation of Ambiorix.

By then, the question was no longer simply why these stocks were difficult to evaluate. He wanted to see whether he could build something useful around the problem.

The System Is Built. Now It Has to Meet the Market.

Today, Ambiorix can generate multiple investment strategies through the system Hanson has built.

Clients aren’t expected to learn the machinery behind them. An asset manager or family office can access a strategy through a secure portal and receive updated information according to that strategy’s rebalance schedule, then decide how—or whether—to use it.

Ambiorix isn’t making the investment decision for them. It develops and licenses the strategy that can become part of that decision.

And this is where Hanson’s challenge has changed.

He knows how to build the system. Now he needs people who make capital-allocation decisions to challenge it. One of the biggest needs he identified wasn’t simply “more customers.”

Those conversations are important because Hanson’s next step is a series of pilot programs with asset managers and family offices. The pilots will give him a chance to see how firms experience both the strategies and the platform before he works to convert them into licensed clients.

This is the point where the technology has to leave the founder’s hands and prove useful in somebody else’s.

He’s Not Building This for a Quick Exit

There’s another reason Hanson is being particular about who comes into the company now. He’s raising approximately $500,000 in pre-seed capital, but he doesn’t describe Ambiorix as something he’s hoping to scale quickly and sell.

He wants to build a lasting financial business.

That changes the kind of investor he’s looking for. One of the challenges he’s already encountered is that many startup investors expect rapid scale and a relatively quick exit. Hanson is looking for capital partners who share his longer view and can bring expertise alongside funding.

The money would help Ambiorix:

Over the next three to five years, Hanson sees another possibility. The process of developing those strategies will also create a growing body of data. He believes that could eventually support a separate research and insights product alongside the strategy-licensing business.

But perhaps the clearest indication of how he sees Ambiorix came when Randall asked him a much simpler question: Is this your end game?

“Yes it is. I’ve been passionate about technology my entire life… and I’m passionate about equity markets also. This is what I want to do for the rest of my career.”

For someone who has spent years moving between technology and markets, Ambiorix is where those two interests finally became the same work.

Why Build It Here?

Ambiorix serves the U.S. market and is based between Northeast Florida and New York. But when Randall asked whether Hanson was bullish or bearish on building this kind of company with Jacksonville as a home base, there wasn’t much hesitation.

He was bullish.

And his reason wasn’t a generic argument about Jacksonville being a growing city.

It was about who’s already here.

“People really underestimate the corpus of expertise and knowledge that is in Northeast Florida when it comes to financial markets, especially public markets.”

Hanson points to the asset managers, financial institutions and experienced professionals already working across Northeast Florida. For Ambiorix, those aren’t just signs of a healthy financial sector. They’re people who can look closely at what he’s building, ask difficult questions and help him understand how it fits into the way capital is actually managed.

That’s what the company needs now.

Not simply attention. Not a room full of people saying the idea sounds interesting.

Those aren’t necessarily easy introductions to make. But they may be closer than he thinks.

After all, Hanson is building a company around finding opportunity in a place others may be overlooking.

There is something fitting about discovering that some of the people who could help him do it are already here in Northeast Florida.

Find Ambiorix

Ambiorix is a financial technology startup based in Northeast Florida and New York that develops quantitative investment strategies focused on small- and mid-cap frontier-technology stocks and licenses those strategies to asset managers, hedge funds and family offices.

Ambiorix is currently looking to connect with asset managers and family offices interested in participating in pilot programs, as well as investors aligned with Hanson’s long-term approach to building the company.

Startup Community Spotlight

Startup Community Spotlight is a JAX Business Calendar storytelling series created to help more people discover the founders, ideas and young companies being built in our community.

Know an asset manager, family office or investment professional who should meet Alphaeus? Make the introduction. The right conversation may be exactly what Ambiorix needs next.