Crowdsourced trading platform Quantopian raises $25m
Crowdsourced online platform Quantopian has secured over $25m in funding from existing investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Khosla Ventures. The company has said it will use the funds to improve its services and education materials, and also to acquire further financial data. With 100,000 members, the company plans to accept financing from external investors at the beginning of next year.

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Quantopian, an online platform that strives to turn anyone into a successful quantitative analyst, has raised $25 million in a series C funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Point72 Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Spark Capital.

Founded out of Boston in 2011, Quantopian says that it “inspires talented people everywhere to write investment algorithms.” In real terms this means offering resources and infrastructure packaged within an online community-based platform for scientists, developers, and students to collaborate and access financial data, educational tools, research, and more.

From the thousands of investment algorithms that are submitted, Quantopian evaluates and selects the best ones based on risk, return, capacity, and other factors. In its purest form, Quantopian is like a crowdsourced investment firm, with the authors of the most effective algorithms able to license their work and receive a share of any profits garnered from the investment strategies they devise.

“With our platform and tools, millions of people can have access to information and education once available only to a small number of people,” said Quantopian founder and CEO John Fawcett. “The Quantopian community continues to grow and engage with our unique platform. We are adding more data and tools to improve the platform and allowing our members to learn as they create and experiment with algorithms.”

Until now, the company had raised around $25 million, and the company says it will use its fresh cash injection to expand, improve its platform and education materials, and acquire more financial data for its 100,000 members. It also plans to open to external investors in early 2017.

Other similar companies that are setting out to democratize the hedge fund industry include the likes of Quantiacs, which has raised around $1.5 million since its inception in 2014.

“The investing and capital markets world is being disrupted — not only with the rise of passive indexing, but also by quantitative models,” added Alex Rampell, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Quantopian has a chance to really disrupt this industry by bringing a distributed contributor approach to finance — harnessing technology to educate and empower the greatest minds around the world.”