The LSE Directory / Hedge funds
Numerai is a San Francisco based quantitative hedge fund that trades a single meta-model assembled from stock-prediction submissions made by a global, mostly anonymous community of data scientists. Rather than employing an in-house research team, the firm distributes obfuscated, regularized market data to tournament participants, who train machine learning models against it and submit predictions on a rolling schedule; the submissions are blended into a Stake-Weighted Meta Model, weighted by how much Numeraire (NMR), Numerai's own cryptocurrency, each participant has staked on their model. Participants earn or lose staked NMR depending on live out-of-sample performance, which ties compensation directly to predictive skill rather than reputation or credentials. The firm differs from most quantitative hedge funds by outsourcing model construction entirely to outside contributors who never see the underlying stock identities behind the obfuscated features, and by using a crypto-token staking mechanism, rather than a subscription or brokerage fee, to price conviction and filter out low-quality submissions. This crowdsourced, stake-weighted approach is unusual among market-neutral equity funds, most of which build signals with an in-house research staff; Numerai instead positions itself as an aggregation layer that combines thousands of independently developed models into one live trading strategy, scored on correlation to realized returns and each model's marginal contribution to the combined Meta Model. Numerai was founded in October 2015 by South African technologist Richard Craib, who remains chief executive. The Numeraire (NMR) token was launched in 2017. The firm has raised venture funding from backers including Union Square Ventures, Shine Capital, and macro investor Paul Tudor Jones, and closed a $30 million Series C round in November 2025 at a $500 million valuation, roughly five times its 2023 valuation. Assets under management grew from roughly $60 million to a range reported between $450 million and $600 million across 2025 and 2026, and the flagship global equity strategy returned 25.45 percent net in 2024. In August 2025, J.P. Morgan Asset Management committed up to $500 million in capacity to Numerai's hedge fund products, an allocation to be deployed over the following year and one of the largest institutional commitments yet to a crowdsourced, AI-driven trading strategy; the announcement was followed by a sharp rally in NMR token price and trading volume.
