WorldQuant’s flagship International Quant Championship (IQC) drew a record 80,000 university entrants this year, double last year’s total, as advances in artificial intelligence lower barriers for students building quantitative trading models, according to a report by Reuters.
The competition, run by the $7bn quant hedge fund, crowned four winners last week, hailing from South Korea, India, Kenya and Taiwan with top honours going to MinKyeom Kim of Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea.
Igor Tulchinsky, WorldQuant’s founder and chairman, said AI tools and language models are reshaping how participants approach the challenge. “
The IQC, now a major talent pipeline for quant funds globally, tasks competitors with developing mathematical models to predict market price movements.
The surge in participation comes as quant hedge funds have seen renewed momentum: firms managing more than $1bn added $44bn in assets in the first half of 2025, according to With Intelligence, supported by strong performance and inflows.
Tulchinsky said WorldQuant is also focused on developing “agentic systems” — autonomous AI-driven platforms capable of making investment decisions — with a long-term goal of deploying one million such agents in the coming years.
