Catching Up with Luca Ferrara
He’s heading up a TIME magazine ‘Best Invention of the Year’—and keeping a surfboard nearby.
- By
- November 07, 2025
- Artificial Intelligence
When Luca Ferrara, MBA ’19, starts talking about artificial intelligence and quantum computing, the force of his enthusiasm is like watching a storm break or a volcano erupt.
Ferrara is AQNav general manager of SandboxAQ, which began as a Google side project in 2016 but is now an independent SaaS firm that focuses on developing AI and quantum-technology tools for companies in telecommunications, financial services, healthcare, and government.
The AQNav—Ferrara’s current project—is a geomagnetic air, land, and sea navigation system that is essentially unjammable and unspoofable, making it a useful backup to GPS. In 2024, TIME magazine named it one of the best inventions of the year.
Earlier in his career, working in the derivatives division at Goldman Sachs in New York, Ferrara hatched an idea for a business involving blockchain. He enrolled at Booth to figure out if the plan would work, though he quickly realized that “there was nothing specific that I knew about blockchain that somebody else couldn’t know, and so there was no particular reason for me to be doing this,” he recalls.
While at Booth, he took courses such as Augmented Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data, and New Venture Strategy. His areas of interest led to a four-month internship at Google in 2018 that he describes as the best summer ever. “I lived in a house in Palo Alto with four other Boothies—we called ourselves ‘The 973’ after the house number—and when we weren’t working, we were surfing or biking. It was a great time.”
Upon graduation, Ferrara joined Google as an associate lead in cloud sales strategy and planning. The company encourages employees to spend 20 percent of their time on side projects. About a year in, working at home during COVID-19 lockdowns, Ferrara discovered one such project, Sandbox. He joined the group and found himself using frameworks from his Booth courses to scope new business ideas, including one of his own, AQNav, which came out of his final project for Scott F. Meadow’s Commercializing Innovation course.
When the division was spun off, conversations with another Booth faculty member, Gregory D. Bunch, played an important role in his decision to go with it. Ferrara says Booth transformed his professional and personal life. He met his wife, Hanh Do, MBA ’19—now Hanh Ferrara—when they were both co-chairs, she of the Adam Smith Society and he of Chicagonomics, at Booth. The couple married in 2021 and recently welcomed their first child, a daughter, Emma. Hanh works as a strategy consultant at Accenture in San Francisco.
Between work and family, it’s a full schedule. Even so, “I’ve still got my surfboard,” Ferrara says. “I refuse to sell it. I just keep striving for a work-life balance that allows me to ride it again.”
Scott F. Meadow is the Kaplan McCormack Family Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship. Gregory D. Bunch is adjunct professor of entrepreneurship.