“This is likely the largest ensemble of stock market machine learning models in the world,” said Andy Weissman, a partner at Union Square Ventures who is working with Numerai. Since starting last year, Numerai says it has given $150,000 to its contributors and is aiming to eventually pay out $1 million a month. Numerai is the latest investment fund that has won backers with the promise of sourcing investment algorithms from the crowd. Perhaps the most successful of these new ventures, Quantopian, is already onto its Series C fund-raising round. With Quantopian, data scientists submit investing algorithms that asset managers around the world can license and use to trade. The algorithm’s authors get a cut of any profits.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/business/dealbook/numerai-investment-hedge-fund.html?_r=0