Quantopian Raises $25M Series C Round Led by Andreessen Horowitz

Quantopian, a Boston-based crowdsourced investment platform, has closed a $25 million Series C round led by renowned West Coast venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

"Andreessen Horowitz shares our vision that technology can dramatically change how we approach investing."

The company announced the new investment, which brings total funding to $48.8 million, on Monday. Other participants in the financing round include previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Steve Cohen’s Point72 Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Spark Capital.

“The team at Andreessen Horowitz shares our vision that technology can dramatically change how we approach investing," John “Fawce” Fawcett, Quantopian's founder and CEO, said. "With our platform and tools, millions of people can have access to information and education once available only to a small number of people."

The company said it plans to use the funds to continue its expansion, which includes improving platform tools, education materials and acquiring more data for use on its platform. The funding will also help the company build out its investment management infrastructure that will allow it to start managing money for external investors starting in early 2017.

With more than 100,000 members now, Quantopian allows anyone with a knack for coding and finance to create and test new stock trading systems using the startup's own software tools.  Select authors can choose to license their algorithms and get paid based on performance.

“The investing and capital markets world is being disrupted — not only with the rise of passive indexing, but also by quantitative models,” Alex Rampell, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz who is joining the company's board of directors, said in a statement. “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.”

It was previously announced that Hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen of Point72 Ventures would give Quantopian $250 million to manage in a new hedge fund. Cohen previously ran SAC Capital Advisors, which pled guilty to insider trading violations in 2013 and shut down. Cohen was never criminally charged, but earlier this year he reached a settlement with federal securities regulators over a civil charge.

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