Andreessen Horowitz is making a move in the robo-investment space backing trading algorithm platform Quantopian in its $25m Series C round.
Funding for the Boston-based company also comes from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Point72 Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Spark Capital.
Quantopian operates a free platform on which its community of more than 100,000 members can access tools, education material, additional data and capital to trial their trading algorithms.
The company then evaluates the performance of each algorithm and makes capital allocations to a certain number based on factors such as return, risk, style, capacity and interaction effects.
The algorithms’ authors receive a share of any net profits generated by their strategies.
This new funding will be used in part to build out the Quantopian’s investment management infrastructure as it prepares to begin managing external investors’ money early next year.
In July Point72 Ventures committed as much as $250m in venture capital to be managed by the platform.
Andreessen Horowitz general partner Alex Rampell said, “the investing and capital markets world is being disrupted — not only with the rise of passive indexing, but also by quantitative models.”
“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.”
The round brings the five-year old company’s total funding to $48.8m following the $15m Series B round it raised in 2014 led by Bessemer Venture partners.
Quantopian is also making hires as it moves to operate more like a traditional asset manager bringing on former Hudson Bay Capital portfolio manager Jonathan Larkin as chief investment officer in June.
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