Numerai Strives to Become the Final Hedge Fund Globally, Powered by AI and a $500 Million Valuation

Numerai, a hedge fund based in San Francisco that utilizes artificial intelligence and decentralized finance, has raised $30 million in a Series C round led by leading university endowments,

— a fivefold increase from its 2023 valuation. The round also saw continued backing from previous investors, including Union Square Ventures, Shine Capital, and macro investor Paul Tudor Jones . J.P. Morgan Asset Management has pledged up to $500 million in hedge fund capacity by August 2025, , setting Numerai up to expand its AI-powered strategies toward managing close to $1 billion in assets.

Richard Craib, founder and CEO of Numerai, highlighted the importance of this funding, noting that it supports the company's goal of creating a "21st-century asset management model" driven by top data scientists. "This funding enables us to accelerate our mission to build the world's final hedge fund—powered by AI and developed by the best data scientists globally," Craib commented

. The capital will be used to grow the AI engineering team, recruit for essential roles, and scale up institutional hedge fund offerings .

Over the past three years, Numerai has increased its assets under management from $60 million to $550 million. In 2024, its main global equity hedge fund achieved a net gain of 25.45%, with only one month in the red, marking its best performance so far. Numerai's investment approach is built on a worldwide data science competition, where thousands of machine learning models produce stock market predictions that are combined into a single Meta Model. Participants use (NMR), a cryptocurrency on Ethereum, to stake and align incentives, integrating blockchain into the research process.

Numerai's unique approach blends AI, open-access trading, and crypto, drawing interest as Wall Street increasingly explores crowd-sourced insights. Its scalable platform and profitability outlook have led to comparisons with prediction-market platforms like Kalshi, though Numerai stands out for its focus on sophisticated equity trading models.

The company has recently expanded by opening a New York office and hiring an AI engineer from Meta Platforms Inc. to utilize large language models for extracting trading signals from text data. The firm's blog also mentioned a $1 million buyback of NMR from the open market, reflecting confidence in its platform.