VC royalty Andreessen Horowitz has led a $25 million Series C funding round for Quantopian, a platform that crowdsources investment algorithms from its online community of amateurs.
Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Steve Cohen’s Point72 Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Spark Capital all joined the round, which takes Quantopian's total funding to nearly $50 million.
Quantopian's free platform boasts 100,000 members from 180 countries bidding to create institutional-quality investment algorithms. The firm says that members - including professors, research scientists and developers - have written some 400,000 algorithms from which it selects the best for its portfolio.
In July it received a major endorsement when billionaire Cohen revealed that he is pumping up to $250 million into a new fund managed by the firm. The platform's algos will be used to manage the funds from Cohen - some of which is contingent on hitting performance metrics - with the authors receiving a royalty based on how his or her strategy does.
Alex Rampell, general partner with Andreessen Horowitz, who joins the Quantopian board, says: "Quantopian has a chance to really disrupt this industry by bringing a distributed contributor approach to finance - harnessing technology to educate and empower the greatest minds around the world."