Numerai, the San Francisco-based quantitative hedge fund backed by Paul Tudor Jones, has secured up to $500m from JPMorgan Asset Management – a commitment that will more than double the firm’s assets under management to nearly $1bn over the next year, according to a report by Bloomberg.
Founded in 2019, Numerai sources stock-trading ideas from a global network of freelance data scientists who are paid and incentivised in the firm’s native cryptocurrency, Numeraire (NMR). Participants stake tokens on their own forecasts, with Numerai aggregating the signals into a long-short equity portfolio.
The fresh allocation follows a sharp performance rebound. Numerai’s flagship fund returned 25% in 2024, recovering from a 17% loss the previous year, and has delivered gains in every year since inception bar one. It has also notched 15 consecutive months of positive performance, according to founder Richard Craib. The fund is up around 6% net of fees so far in 2025.
Craib likens the firm’s approach to multi-strategy platforms such as Millennium, drawing from a diverse pool of investment ideas, but argues Numerai is more cost efficient.
Numerai’s model reflects the convergence of several hedge fund trends, including the use of machine learning, alternative data, and crypto-based incentive structures. While earlier crowdsourcing experiments such as Quantopian ultimately failed, Numerai has managed to refine its framework and attract institutional backing at scale.
