Numerai

Numerai is a hedge fund headquartered in San Francisco, California, founded by Richard Craib in October, 2015. The company hosts an open data-science competition, in which anonymous competitiors compete to make the best stock market predictions using machine learning models trained on obfuscated financial data. Competitors are rewarded with a digital currency known as Numeraire in proportion to the quality of their predictions.

Numerai encrypts its trading data prior to sharing it with the participating data scientists to prevent them from mimicking the fund's activity. This encrypted data is organized in a way that allows the data scientists to build models that can potentially execute trades more effectively. The efficacy of the company's model has been questioned by Michael Wellman, a University of Michigan professor, who suggested that it is unnecessarily complicated.

Numerai's inception was driven by Craib's vision of using artificial intelligence and collective intelligence to make investment decisions. In December of the same year, the firm began hosting a continuous competition, inviting data scientists to use machine learning models to predict stock market trends.

In April 2016, Numerai secured an initial $1.5 million in funding from a group of investors led by Howard Morgan and Naval Ravikant. By the end of 2016, Union Square Ventures joined as investors, raising an additional $6 million.

In 2017, Numerai became the first hedge fund to introduce its own cryptocurrency, Numeraire (NMR), to incentivize the participation of data scientists in its tournaments. The introduction of Numeraire was intended to incentivize better modeling, encourage collaboration amongst participants, and facilitate international payment.

Also in 2017, Numerai announced the addition of cryogenic freezing to its health plan, offering employees the opportunity to be cryogenically preserved after death.