The Hedge Fund Run by Machines Is Going Agentic

Numerai, the crowdsourced hedge fund, is moving from human quants to AI agents.

Richard Craib runs one of Wall Street’s most unconventional business models: a crowdsourced hedge fund. He also counts JPMorgan as his biggest backer.

Craib, a South African mathematician, launched Numerai in 2015 in San Francisco, far from the epicenter of finance in New York, with the goal of reinventing how hedge funds are built.

Numerai crowdsources stock market predictions from thousands of data scientists worldwide by providing encrypted financial data that obscures the underlying securities. It then aggregates those forecasts into a single trading strategy. Contributors stake the company’s cryptocurrency, Numeraire, on their models, earning rewards for strong performance and losing funds for poor results.

Despite its unconventional structure, Numerai manages real capital and in August secured a commitment of up to $500 million from JPMorgan Asset Management, potentially more than doubling the fund’s size. The investment followed a strong year for the fund, which reported a 25.45%…