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Quantopian Attracts $15M in Series B Funding Led by
Bessemer Venture Partners
Announces Plans for a Quant Hedge Fund
Boston, MA - October 16, 2014 - Algorithmic investing platform, Quantopian
announced today that it has secured $15 million in Series B financing from lead
investor Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), with returning top-tier investors,
Khosla Ventures, Spark Capital, and Wicklow Capital also participating. With this
round of funding, the company will develop the Quantopian Managers Program
- a hedge fund that allocates capital to the top-performing quants in the
community.
As part of the funding, BVP partner Rob Stavis will join the board of
directors. “Quantopian is the premier developer platform for algorithmic trading
across various security types and has an unparalleled community of top
algorithmic and financial talent,” said partner, Rob Stavis. “We are excited to
work with Quantopian to create a new category in asset management. For
Bessemer, it’s an exciting business that exists at the intersection of two areas of
investment interest: disruptive asset management and platforms for software
developers.”
"Earlier this year, Quantopian changed the landscape of algorithmic trading. We
now allow quants to put their money where their minds are through the seamless
integration of writing algorithms, backtesting, and live trading. Rob Stavis
recognized what this dramatic shift meant." said John Fawcett, Quantopian
founder and CEO. "We look forward to working with him as we continue to design
the Quantopian hedge fund to reward algorithm writers and investors alike.”
The Quantopian Managers Program will provide quants access to a full suite of
tools, infrastructure and data to test and deploy investment strategies. The
program gives them control over their own portfolio and the ability to scale their
success. Allocation of capital will be based on performance. Every quant that is
currently trading real money on the system is building a track record that might
qualify them for the new fund. Quantopian is actively recruiting new quants to
start their track record now.
"Quantopian’s mission is to attract and train the world’s best algorithmic and
financial talent, including talent that hasn’t yet had the opportunity to be a quant,"
said Khosla Ventures partner, Ben Ling. "The company's latest effort will take the
final step to connect that quant community with capital."
Quantopian offers an environment to write and test code, 12 years of minute-bar
pricing for U.S. equities data, and a community of 25,000 quants. They are
expanding their offering to include a research environment, fundamental
company data and additional brokerage integrations.
"Quantopian is blossoming. The seamless dev-test-trade platform delivers deep
single-player value, and the community of quants provides great multiplayer
value," said Andrew Parker, general partner at Spark Capital. "With their strong
balance sheet, Quantopian can now invest in building their community of
emerging systematic trading managers into a fund vehicle."
About Quantopian
Quantopian is a browser-based algorithmic investing platform that brings
algorithmic trading to the broader investing community. For quants, the platform
combines the ability to integrate any data instantly with the simplicity to get
started developing in minutes, all the while protecting intellectual property. For
investors, Quantopian makes the full potential of quantitative trading available by
providing access to tools, capabilities and the community necessary to create
and optimize their own trading algorithms in an open and transparent
environment in addition to putting those algorithms to work in the live market.
Quantopian is an engaged community whose members discuss concepts,
processes and performance and learn from peers and experts. The result is a
better way to understand and profit from quantitative trading. Quantopian is
headquartered in Boston, MA. For more information, visit www.quantopian.com
or check out this demo of the Quantopian platform. Follow us on Twitter
@quantopian.