NEW YORK, March 18, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Quantbase has secured $500k in pre-seed funding to make high-risk investing easy, through automated portfolios for everything high-risk, with buttoned-up quant hedge fund strategies on one end and crypto indices on the other, peppered with mass appeal strategies like the Nancy Pelosi tracker and Inverse Cramer index.
The round included participation from Witz Ventures (founded by Christian Blackwell and finance content creator Austin Hankwitz, with over 600k followers), Dorm Room Fund, Trolley Ventures, Soleil Capitale, YC alumni, and Thirdline Capital head Larry Eiben, among others.
Part of the new funding will be used to extend the startup's crypto portfolio offering, letting the company go toe-to-toe with full-scale retail platforms like Vanguard. The company aims to standardize the alternative space - which includes crypto and NFTs, but also assets like wine and non-assets like prediction markets - in the same way Vanguard has helped standardize the traditional finance world.
The startup, currently headquartered on Wall St, was founded in 2021 by Thomas Stewart (serial founder with multiple exits under his belt) and Som Mohapatra (quant trader and portfolio manager), who first met at the University of Virginia.
"We actually met in an entrepreneurship group that had been started in early 2021. I'd gotten a lot of initial signals from Hacker News and Reddit, where I hang out, and Som was taking his classes pass-fail to focus on building a stock exchange for financializing opinion. We met, realized it was a perfect fit after a few weeks of working together, and have been going strong since."
The founders are young - Stewart a recent grad, and Mohapatra on leave from university - but have proven their prowess and wit. Prior to beginning their fundraise, the pair amassed a waitlist of 5,000 users, soft committing $70M in assets under management - about $16.1k committed per user.
Part of this new funding will go towards product development. The startup's ferocious, talented engineering team has a number of accolades, including senior software engineers with almost a decade building full-stack consumer products at Google and Amazon, automation engineers at leading insurtech firms, and engineers and advisors at fintech firms like Chime, Robinhood, and OpenSea, as well as at firms Citadel and Goldman Sachs.
Quantbase, an SEC-registered investment advisor, is carving out a niche for itself in the high-risk space.
"We're finding that, even though there's demand, very few advisors/firms in the traditional investment space are willing to even talk high-risk, let alone make it easily investable. And on the other side, alternative investments like DeFi and retail leveraged algo-trading are all about the acceptance of short term volatility for long term, super-sized growth. There's value in bridging this gap, and it's exactly the value we're looking to provide."
According to the team, the long-term vision tackles the next $20-40T in the next wave of alternative and high-risk assets, as they go from niche assets with media coverage that far outclasses AUM, to accepted members of a well-hedged portfolio. Quantbase aims to make high-risk not just definable, but standardized and investable across the board. The site is live at getquantbase.com.
Media Contact
Som Mohapatra, Quantbase, 1 8047096974, [email protected]
SOURCE Quantbase
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