Numerai raised $30 million in a Series C round led by top university endowments, giving the AI-driven, crypto-incentivized hedge fund a $500 million valuation — five times its valuation in 2023.
Following the announcement, Numeraire (NMR), the token that powers the platform’s crowdsourced prediction network, jumped over 40%, according to CoinGecko data.
The raise drew participation from existing backers such as Shine Capital, Union Square Ventures and Paul Tudor Jones.
The company said it has expanded assets under management (AUM) to $550 million from about $60 million over the past three years, including about $100 million in the last month. Its Meta Model posted a 25.45% net return in 2024 with one down month.
Founded in 2015, Numerai is a San Francisco–based quantitative hedge fund that crowdsources machine-learning models from thousands of anonymous data scientists worldwide.
Its native token, NMR, underpins the system by allowing participants to stake on their predictions, earning NMR when their models perform well on real market data and losing it when they don’t.
The funding round comes after the company secured a $500 million commitment from JPMorgan Asset Management in August, which it aims to deploy over the next year.
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The rise of AI agents
Numerai’s funding round comes as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in crypto infrastructure. AI agents are part of that shift, acting as autonomous programs that can monitor markets, process data and execute blockchain actions on their own.
In October, Paxos Labs co-founder Bhau Kotecha said AI agents could become the “X-factor” in stablecoins, routing liquidity to the most efficient issuers. Rather than people driving adoption, he argued that autonomous systems could rapidly shift funds across chains, turning market fragmentation into an advantage.
One company supporting that vision is Cloudflare, which announced it was developing a stablecoin that supports instant transactions by AI agents called NET dollar in September.
Coinbase is also experimenting with AI agents. Its x402 protocol, introduced in May, allows AI agents to transact in stablecoins without human input. The protocol saw an increase in transactions of more than 10,000% from Oct. 14 to Oct. 20.
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