Quantopian Attracts $15M in Series B Funding Led by Bessemer Venture Partners
Announces Plans for a Quant Hedge Fund
BOSTON, Oct. 16, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- 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.
SOURCE Quantopian
Share this article