Apoorva Mehta, co-founder of Instacart, has created a hedge fund designed to manage much of its investments through artificial intelligence rather than traditional portfolio managers, Bloomberg reported.
The company, Abundance, is based in Palo Alto, California. It started last year.
Abundance has a small team of quantitative researchers, engineers, and AI specialists focused on building and maintaining its models.
Mehta told Bloomberg that the fund deploys thousands of automated agents. These systems track information sources, propose trading ideas, conduct research, choose positions, set position sizes, and place trades.
Many hedge funds already use artificial intelligence tools to support human decision-making. Abundance’s long-term goal is to move toward artificial intelligence systems that alone manage investment decisions across the entire portfolio.
Some of the company’s stock-picking strategies are already fully automated, Mehta said.
Other strategies being developed will continue to include some human input for the time being.
Mehta argued that people have natural limits compared to AI. People “can only track so many opportunities at a time, process them deeply, and make so many high-quality decisions,” he said.
“Even for the exceptional investor, the process is locked in their mind. AI changes that completely.”
Currently, the fund mainly trades with its own capital and has a team of around ten people. Plan to accept outside money later.
Abundance has raised $100 million in seed funding, according to Bloomberg. It requires long and short positions in stocks and plans to expand into other asset classes.
Mehta co-founded Instacart in 2012, exiting about a decade after the grocery delivery company’s initial public offering.
A document shows that, as of June 30, Mehta still owned nearly 8.4% of Instacart.
“Instacart Co-Founder Launches Hedge Fund That Backs AI Agents Instead of Portfolio Managers” was created and originally published by Private Banker International, a brand owned by GlobalData.
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