Fred Wilson on Numerai

Late last year, USV invested in Numerai, a hedge fund that uses data scientists all around the world to “crowdsource” stock price predictions. I blogged a bit about Numerai then.

If that business model wasn’t cutting-edge enough for you, the Numerai team has now gone a step further and issued a crypto-token called Numeraire to incent these data scientists to work together to build the best models instead of just competing with each other.

[Numerai is] a new kind of hedge fund that allows machine learning experts all over the world to crowdsource public market investments by building models and sharing the selections that come out of their models. The data they use to power these models is encrypted and so are their models. It is the “blind leading the blind”. . . . I like that description as the focus moves away from things like fundamental and technical stock analysis to true pattern recognition done by machines. Numerai uses cutting edge encryption technology (a variation on homomorphic encryption), machine learning, and pays out using the bitcoin blockchain. It’s a trifecta of things that are interesting to us [at Union Square Ventures].