Numerai is a crowd-sourced AI hedge fund and data science tournament founded in 2015 by Richard Craib. Instead of hiring a single team of quants, Numerai distributes obfuscated financial datasets to thousands of data scientists around the world, who train machine learning models to predict the stock market. The best-performing models are blended into a meta-model that drives the fund's trading strategy.
In November 2025, Numerai raised a $30 million Series C at a $500 million post-money valuation. The round was led by three undisclosed top university endowments, with participation from Union Square Ventures, Shine Capital, and Paul Tudor Jones. The fund had grown assets under management from roughly $60 million to about $550 million in three years, adding around $100 million in the month leading up to the round. J.P. Morgan Asset Management also committed up to $500 million in capacity in August 2025.
Numerai's flagship strategy reported a net return of 25.45% in 2024 with only one down month, according to the company. Data scientists who participate stake the platform's native NMR token on their predictions, earning payouts when their models perform well and losing stake when they underperform — a mechanism that aligns incentives without disclosing private data or strategies. The tournament has paid out millions in cumulative rewards to contributors globally.
For data scientists, Numerai functions as both a competition and a long-term research project. The signals contributors generate feed directly into a live hedge fund, making it one of the largest production deployments of crowd-sourced machine learning in finance. The company is using its new capital to expand engineering and research teams and to open a New York office alongside its larger San Francisco headquarters. Within the broader landscape of quant funds, Numerai is unique for its open data layer, its tournament structure, and its crypto-staking mechanism.