Browser-based algorithmic trading start-up Quantopian has secured $6.7M in Series A financing from Khosla Ventures and existing investor Spark Capital.
Quantopian's mission is to put the kind of algorithmic trading capabilities currently only available to big Wall Street institutions into the hands of tech-savvy individual users - like engineers, developers, mathematicians, and data scientists in other industries.
The firm launched earlier this year on the back of an initial $8.8 million injection of funds. The Boston-based start-up recently moved into live trading in beta and has hired former Thomson Reuters executive Jessica Stauth as vice president of quant strategy.
Quantopian has already gathered a community of 10,000 users, attracted to the provision of unfettered access to a decade's worth of trading data for backtesting, alongside the ability to import external data sets for trial runs on the Quantopian platform.
While the firm has yet to spell out a plan to monetise its user base, the VCs investing in Quantopian are clearly fired up about the its prospects.
Ben Ling, investment partner at Khosla Ventures, comments: "What excites me about Quantopian is the potential of the open platform to create a whole new category of investment possibilities by giving anyone with an analytical mind access to sophisticated tools, data and algorithms that have previously been behind the walls of the largest investment and trading firms. It is still the early days, but with the combination of the core technology platform and the community of the smartest quantitative minds, Quantopian is building the next era of investment."