Quantopian has raised USD25 million in a Series C financing round led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
The company, which offers a free online platform for education and creation of institutional-quality investment algorithms, will use the funds to continue expansion, including improved platform tools, education materials, and the acquisition of additional data for use by its more than 100,000 members.
The funding also will facilitate the buildout of Quantopian's investment management infrastructure as it prepares to manage money for external investors in early 2017.
The Series C round also includes additional investments from earlier investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Steve Cohen’s Point72 Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Spark Capital. The latest round follows earlier rounds totalling USD23.8 million.
“We are thrilled to add Andreessen Horowitz to our team of investors,” says John “Fawce” Fawcett, founder and CEO of Quantopian. “The team at Andreessen Horowitz shares our vision that technology can dramatically change how we approach investing. With our platform and tools, millions of people can have access to information and education once available only to a small number of people.”
“The investing and capital markets world is being disrupted – not only with the rise of passive indexing, but also by quantitative models,” says Alex Rampell, a general partner with 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.”
Rampell also is joining Quantopian’s board of directors.
Andreessen Horowitz is a venture capital firm which has made investments in technology companies such as Facebook, Twitter, AirBnB, Pinterest and Skype.
The latest round of investment funding comes as membership in the Quantopian community recently passed 100,000 members.
“The Quantopian community continues to grow and engage with our unique platform,” says Fawcett. “We are adding more data and tools to improve the platform and allowing our members to learn as they create and experiment with algorithms.”
Quantopian is the only company to offer a fully integrated community-based platform that offers access to deep financial data, powerful research capabilities, university-level education tools, a backtester, and the opportunity to receive a capital allocation.
Quantopian’s portfolio of investment algorithms is selected from hundreds of thousands of algorithms written by its members – including professors, finance professionals, research scientists, developers, and students.
Quantopian evaluates the performance of each algorithm on its platform and makes allocations to selected algorithms based on factors including return, risk, style, capacity, and interaction effects. The authors of the selected algorithms receive a share of the net profits generated from their investment strategies.
