Numerai's Decentralized AI Model 5X Valuation as CEO Aims to Be 'Last Hedge Fund'

Numerai, the San Francisco-based AI-driven hedge fund, 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 raise, which includes participation from existing backers like Union Square Ventures, Shine Capital, and macro investor Paul Tudor Jones, marks a significant milestone for the platform that crowdsources machine-learning models from global data scientists.

The funding follows a $500 million capacity commitment from JPMorgan Asset Management in August 2025, which Numerai aims to deploy over the next year. The combined capital injection will support expansion of its AI engineering teams, hiring efforts, and the scaling of institutional hedge fund products. Over the past three years, Numerai's assets under management (AUM) have surged from $60 million to $550 million, with $100 million added in the last month alone. In 2024, its flagship global equity hedge fund delivered a 25.45% net return, its strongest annual performance to date.

Numerai's native token, Numeraire (NMR), saw a 40% price surge post-announcement, reflecting investor confidence in its decentralized model. NMR is central to Numerai's ecosystem, enabling participants to stake tokens on their predictive models, earning or burning them based on performance against real market data which aligns incentives between the firm and its global community of data scientists, who submit signals aggregated into a single "Meta Model" for trading.

Numerai's growth coincides with a broader shift in crypto infrastructure toward AI agents, which automate market monitoring, data processing, and blockchain transactions. Companies like Cloudflare and Coinbase are experimenting with AI-driven stablecoins and protocols to facilitate autonomous trading. Numerai's CEO, Richard Craib, emphasized the firm's vision of becoming "the world's last hedge fund," leveraging open, competitive machine intelligence over traditional multi-manager models.

While most sources cite a $500 million valuation, one report from Lookonchain notes a $5 billion valuation, highlighting potential discrepancies in reporting. Regardless, the funding underscores Numerai's role in redefining asset management through decentralized AI collaboration.