San Francisco-based hedge fund and data science platform Numerai said it has closed a $30 million Series C round led by top university endowments, giving the firm a $500 million valuation. The company said the new equity financing, together with J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s August 2025 commitment of up to $500 million in hedge fund capacity, gives it more room to scale its AI-driven strategies toward nearly $1 billion in assets under management.
Existing backers joined the round
Returning investors in the financing include Union Square Ventures, Shine Capital, and macro investor Paul Tudor Jones. Numerai said those investors, along with J.P. Morgan Asset Management, reflect a mix of endowments, venture firms, and global macro capital that has backed the company across multiple rounds.
Founder and CEO Richard Craib said the round brought in the type of investors Numerai wants behind the business: long-term backers with a deep understanding of the model and a willingness to support a different approach to asset management. He also said the fresh capital and the capacity commitment from J.P. Morgan Asset Management would help the firm press ahead with its goal of building what he called the world’s last hedge fund, powered by AI created by competitive data scientists around the world.
According to the company, the proceeds will be used to expand AI engineering and research teams, add hires across key functions, increase participation in its global data science tournament, and support the growth of its institutional hedge fund products.
AUM rose from about $60 million to $550 million in three years
Numerai said its assets under management have grown from roughly $60 million to $550 million over the past three years. In 2024, its flagship global equity hedge fund posted a 25.45% net return with only one down month, which the firm described as the strongest year in its history.
The investment process is built around a coordinated global tournament in which thousands of machine learning models submit stock market signals. Those signals are then combined into a single Meta Model that trades global equities. Numerai, founded in 2015, also uses an open API to draw contributions from data scientists worldwide.
NMR staking ties model performance to crypto incentives
Numerai’s ecosystem centers on Numeraire, or NMR, an Ethereum-based cryptocurrency used inside its data science tournament. Participants stake NMR on their stock market signals and can either earn rewards or see tokens burned based on their scores. The company said this structure is designed to align incentives between Numerai and its contributing data scientists while linking the research process to the broader blockchain ecosystem.
Numerai’s stated thesis is that the future of asset management belongs to open, competitive machine intelligence rather than a closed multi-manager model. This latest financing and the added fund capacity give that thesis a larger capital base.