Richard Craib is the founder and CEO of Numerai, a San Francisco-based hedge fund designed to crowdsource data for artificial intelligence in stock market environments. Craib is a South African technologist who founded Numerai in October 2015. ^[2]

Education

Richard Craib attended the University of Cape Town in 2007 where he studied Mathematics and Economics. In 2008, he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley as an exchange student and graduated from there in 2009. ^[3]

Afterward, Richard went to Cornell University where he studied for a Bachelor's degree in pure mathematics and graduated in 2012. ^[3]

Career

Before developing Numerai, Richard was the Co-founder and Director of US Operations at DataProphet. ^[2]

Later on, he built a global equity fund powered by machine learning at a $15 billion asset manager, Prudential (M&G). This is where he first developed Numerai’s approach to financial data regularization, a crucial step in applying machine intelligence to the stock market. ^[7]

Numeraire

In October 2015, Richard founded Numerai in San Francisco to build a new kind of hedge fund where data scientists around the world collaborate to predict equity returns using artificial intelligence. ^[1]

Numerai is a crowd-sourced hedge fund that uses artificial intelligence to make trades and investments in major stock markets around the world. Numeraire (NMR) is a cryptocurrency that acts as a hedge fund and allows users to trade equities on the Ethereum blockchain. ^[1]

About the genesis of Numeraire, Richard said:

I just thought, and it hit me very hard when I thought about it, I was like, "There needs to be at least one open hedge fund, and hopefully just one, where it's like open source, it gathers the best people, they build amazing software," and that's what Numerai did for hedge funds.^[5]

Numerai organizes a guessing game where people, often data scientists, create models to predict how money-related things like stocks will change. These models compete with each other. Those who make the best predictions win prizes. If they are confident in their predictions, they can also bet Numeraire Tokens (NMR) to win more. Numerai has the backing of Peter Diamandis, Renaissance Technologies co-founder Howard Morgan, and Union Square Ventures. ^[1]

Explaining Numeraire, Richard said:

"The thing we’re trying to solve is predicting the stock market and getting really good intelligence about that particular problem. But why it’s interesting is that a lot of people think maybe that’s impossible and so how would you go about it if it was considered this very, very hard problem?

The way we go about it is by first of all, giving away all of our data so that anyone can build any model that they want on our dataset using any machine learning algorithm or any approach.

The next thing you need is incentives. You need incentives not to overfit, right? And so we make our users stake cryptocurrency on their models and so we have the best modeling talent because we have much more, many more data scientists working on Numerai than any other hedge fund in the world and we have the best incentives because everyone who’s working on the models that we use for trading are staking them, so they’re fully aligned. And so putting those things together over time, we’re just getting better and better and better and better at this problem and it’s starting to really work at the moment." ^[8]

In 2017, Richard was selected to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Finance category. ^[4]

Events

On April 9, 2018, he attended the LendIt Fintech USA 2018 conference as a speaker. On October 10, 2018, he attended Blockcon 2018 conference as a speaker. ^[2]