Numerai Aims to Be the World's Last Hedge Fund with AI-Driven $500M Valuation

Numerai, a San Francisco–based hedge fund leveraging AI and decentralized finance, has secured $30 million in a Series C funding round led by top university endowments, valuing the firm at $500 million - five times its 2023 valuation. The round includes participation from existing investors such as Union Square Ventures, Shine Capital, and macro investor Paul Tudor Jones according to reports. J.P. Morgan Asset Management's August 2025 commitment of up to $500 million in hedge fund capacity, combined with the new equity financing, positions Numerai to scale its AI-driven strategies toward nearly $1 billion in assets under management (AUM).

Richard Craib, Numerai's founder and CEO, emphasized the significance of the round, stating it aligns with the firm's vision of building a "21st-century asset management model" powered by competitive data scientists. "This capital allows us to push harder on our mission of building the world's last hedge fund-powered by AI built by top competitive data scientists around the world," Craib said according to reports. The funds will be allocated to expanding AI engineering teams, hiring across key functions, and scaling institutional hedge fund products as detailed in the firm's blog.

Over three years, Numerai has grown AUM from $60 million to $550 million. In 2024, its flagship global equity hedge fund delivered a net return of 25.45% with only one down month, marking its strongest performance to date. The firm's investment process relies on a global data science tournament where thousands of machine learning models generate stock market signals, aggregated into a single Meta Model. Participants stake Numeraire (NMR), an Ethereum-based cryptocurrency, to align incentives and integrate blockchain into its research ecosystem.

The firm's unconventional model intersects AI, democratized trading, and cryptocurrencies, attracting attention as Wall Street increasingly taps into crowd-sourced intelligence. Numerai's profitability expectations and scalable platform have drawn comparisons to prediction-market platforms like Kalshi, though its focus on complex equity-trading models distinguishes it.

Recent expansions include opening a New York office and hiring an AI engineer from Meta Platforms Inc. to leverage large language models for generating trading signals from textual data. The firm's blog also highlighted a $1 million purchase of NMR from the open market, signaling confidence in its ecosystem.