Numerai

Numerai runs its research as an open competition and pays in its own money. Thousands of outside data scientists submit encrypted predictions and stake NMR, the firm's own crypto token, on them; Numerai blends the submissions into a stake-weighted meta-model that drives a real global equity market-neutral book, all without ever revealing the fund's positions.

Richard Craib started it in San Francisco in 2015, basing it in the Presidio, and outsourced the alpha-generation function rather than building a large internal research staff. The backer list reads like a vote of confidence in the experiment: Paul Tudor Jones, Union Square Ventures and Renaissance co-founder Howard Morgan.